Neuroscience
Not surprisingly, confessions are extremely persuasive in court, but according to Jessica Klaver and colleagues, all too often these confessions are false, leading to the wrong person being found guilty.
Now Klaver's team have used an elegant laboratory task to compare two types of interrogation technique and found that it is so-called 'minimising' questions and remarks - those that downplay the seriousness of the offence, and which blame other people or circumstances - that are the most likely to lead to a false confession.
Over two hundred Asian and Caucasian students were invited to take part in what they were told was a test of their personality and typing skills. During the typing part of the task, they were warned in advance that pressing the 'Alt' key would cause the computer to crash and a loss of all data. Subsequently, when the participants were required by the task to type 'Z' (near the 'Alt' key), the researchers contrived it so that the computer duly crashed, and the participants were accused of pressing the 'Alt' key.
Next the students were subjected to either 'minimising' remarks (e.g. "Don't worry. It was just an accident" and "This programme seems not to be working lately") or 'maximising' remarks that played up both the evidence for the student being guilty and the seriousness of the alleged error (e.g. "You must have pressed it" and "We have run over 50 people on this test in the past three weeks and the computer hasn't crashed once").
Overall, 43 per cent of the students subsequently signed a confession statement, stating falsely that they had indeed pressed the 'Alt' key. Crucially, the confession rate was four times higher among the students subjected to minimising remarks as opposed to maximising remarks.
The researchers said that in real life, minimising techniques "give the suspect a false sense of security using flattery, offering legal or moral face-saving excuses for actions, conceptualising actions as accidental, blaming the victim and underplaying the seriousness of the charges."
Further analysis showed the female students were more likely to falsely confess, as were those students who scored high on a test of suggestibility. Personality factors such as self-esteem were not related to the rate of false confession.
"A continued investigation of the factors that contribute to false confessions and confession behaviour in general will greatly inform our understanding of the phenomenon and aid in efforts to prevent the occurrence of false confessions and their liberty-depriving consequences," the researchers said.
_________________________________
Klaver, J.R., Lee, Z., Rose, V.G. (2008). Effects of personality, interrogation techniques and plausibility in an experimental false confession paradigm. Legal and Criminological Psychology, 13(1), 71-88. DOI: 10.1348/135532507X193051
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
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Neuroscience
The type of interrogation likely to lead to false confessions
Not surprisingly, confessions are extremely persuasive in court, but according to Jessica Klaver and colleagues, all too often these confessions are false, leading to the wrong person being found guilty.Now Klaver's team have used an elegant laboratory task to compare two types of interrogation technique and found that it is so-called 'minimising' questions and remarks - those that downplay the seriousness of the offence, and which blame other people or circumstances - that are the most likely to lead to a false confession.
Over two hundred Asian and Caucasian students were invited to take part in what they were told was a test of their personality and typing skills. During the typing part of the task, they were warned in advance that pressing the 'Alt' key would cause the computer to crash and a loss of all data. Subsequently, when the participants were required by the task to type 'Z' (near the 'Alt' key), the researchers contrived it so that the computer duly crashed, and the participants were accused of pressing the 'Alt' key.
Next the students were subjected to either 'minimising' remarks (e.g. "Don't worry. It was just an accident" and "This programme seems not to be working lately") or 'maximising' remarks that played up both the evidence for the student being guilty and the seriousness of the alleged error (e.g. "You must have pressed it" and "We have run over 50 people on this test in the past three weeks and the computer hasn't crashed once").
Overall, 43 per cent of the students subsequently signed a confession statement, stating falsely that they had indeed pressed the 'Alt' key. Crucially, the confession rate was four times higher among the students subjected to minimising remarks as opposed to maximising remarks.
The researchers said that in real life, minimising techniques "give the suspect a false sense of security using flattery, offering legal or moral face-saving excuses for actions, conceptualising actions as accidental, blaming the victim and underplaying the seriousness of the charges."
Further analysis showed the female students were more likely to falsely confess, as were those students who scored high on a test of suggestibility. Personality factors such as self-esteem were not related to the rate of false confession.
"A continued investigation of the factors that contribute to false confessions and confession behaviour in general will greatly inform our understanding of the phenomenon and aid in efforts to prevent the occurrence of false confessions and their liberty-depriving consequences," the researchers said.
_________________________________
Klaver, J.R., Lee, Z., Rose, V.G. (2008). Effects of personality, interrogation techniques and plausibility in an experimental false confession paradigm. Legal and Criminological Psychology, 13(1), 71-88. DOI: 10.1348/135532507X193051
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
- The Special Issue Spotter
We trawl the world's journals so you don't have to: Social Neuroscience of Psychiatric Disorders (Social Neuroscience). Virtual Issue: Interrogation techniques, information-gathering and (false) confessions (Legal and Criminological Psychology)....
- How The Fluency Of Your Own Actions Affects Your Judgment Of Others
Last year the psychologists Steven Tipper and Patric Bach asked students to perform an identification task with a difference. Two men were shown either kicking a ball or typing at a keyboard. Crucially, the students had to signal their recognition of...
- Just How Good Are Police Officers At Detecting Liars?
By Emma Barrett, of Psychology and Crime News and the Deception Blog. We had just sat through a presentation by a proponent of the Reid Technique, a potentially psychologically coercive method of persuading a suspect to confess, used widely in North America...
- Abstract Of The Day: Memory Distortion
Schacter DL, Slotnick SD. The cognitive neuroscience of memory distortion. Neuron. 2004 Sep 30;44(1):149-60. Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138 USA. Memory distortion occurs in the laboratory and in everyday life....
- New Umd Minor In Public Leadership!
Sponsored by the School of Public Policy, the Public Leadership Minor allows students to examine pressing issues, such as the global environment, human rights, diversity, and poverty, that are facing today’s leaders. This minor provides students with...