False Confessions: Causes, Consequences, and Implications for Reform

ABSTRACT— Despite the commonsense belief that people do not confess to crimes they did not commit, 20 to 25% of all DNA exonerations involve innocent prisoners who confessed. After distinguishing between voluntary, compliant, and internalized false confessions, this article suggests that a sequence of three processes is responsible for false confessions and their adverse consequences. First, police sometimes target innocent people for interrogation because of erroneous judgments of truth and deception. Second, innocent people sometimes confess as a function of certain interrogation tactics, dispositional suspect vulnerabilities, and the phenomenology of innocence. Third, jurors fail to discount even those confessions they see as coerced. At present, researchers are seeking ways to improve the accuracy of confession evidence and its evaluation in the courtroom.     

Investigating true and false confessions within a novel experimental paradigm

The primary goal of the current study was to develop a novel experimental paradigm with which to study the influence of psychologically based interrogation techniques on the likelihood of true and false confessions. The paradigm involves guilty and innocent participants being accused of intentionally breaking an experimental rule, or "cheating." In the first demonstration of this paradigm, we explored the influence of two common police interrogation tactics: minimization and an explicit offer of leniency, or a "deal." Results indicated that guilty persons were more likely to confess than innocent persons, and that the use of minimization and the offer of a deal increased the rate of both true and false confessions. Police investigators are encouraged to avoid interrogation techniques that imply or directly promise leniency, as they appear to reduce the diagnostic value of any confession that is elicited.     

On the psychology of confessions: does innocence put innocents at risk?

The Central Park jogger case and other recent exonerations highlight the problem of wrongful convictions, 15% to 25% of which have contained confessions in evidence. Recent research suggests that actual innocence does not protect people across a sequence of pivotal decisions: (a) In preinterrogation interviews, investigators commit false-positive errors, presuming innocent suspects guilty; (b) naively believing in the transparency of their innocence, innocent suspects waive their rights; (c) despite or because of their denials, innocent suspects elicit highly confrontational interrogations; (d) certain commonly used techniques lead suspects to confess to crimes they did not commit; and (e) police and others cannot distinguish between uncorroborated true and false confessions. It appears that innocence puts innocents at risk, that consideration should be given to reforming current practices, and that a policy of videotaping interrogations is a necessary means of protection.     

A test of the micro‐expressions training tool: Does it improve lie detection?

The purpose of the study was to examine the effectiveness of the micro‐expressions training tool (METT) in identifying and using micro‐expressions to improve lie detection. Participants (n = 90) were randomly assigned to receive training in micro‐expressions recognition, a bogus control training, or no training. All participants made veracity judgements of five randomly selected videos of targets providing deceptive or truthful statements. With the use of the Bayesian analyses, we found that the METT group did not outperform those in the bogus training and no training groups. Further, overall accuracy was slightly below chance. Implications of these results are discussed.