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.     

Fischer’s Way: The Next Level

I present an analogy between analytic philosophy and a particular sort of computer game, and analyze some aspects of John Martin Fischer's My Way in the light of this analogy. I set out the different levels of the free will question, and explore how well Fischer does on them. On the compatibility level, he succeeds, in my view, in confronting the "metaphysical challenge" and the "manipulation challenge", but does less well with the "moral arbitrariness challenge". The compatibilist perspective captures only part of the moral and personal truth on the compatibility issue, and is shown to be inherently shallow. On the next levels we see that Fischer confronts particular dangers: the very virtues that make his minimalist position so resilient on the second (compatibility) level, render it too impoverished when it comes to the third, which asks about the very importance of taking moral responsibility seriously. Connecting to other positions (such as P.F. Strawson's version of naturalism) may be an imperative, but would also be risky. Likewise, on the fourth level, where we confront the difficulty of deciding how to deal with the previous conclusions, it is doubtful how well Fischer can do, given his previous philosophical commitments.

Sleep disturbances in depressed pregnant women and their newborns

Pregnant women (N=253) were recruited during their second trimester of pregnancy (M=22.3 weeks gestation) and assigned to depressed (N=83) and non-depressed groups based on a SCID diagnosis of depression. They were then given self-report measures on sleep disturbance, depression, anxiety and anger, and their urine was assayed for norepinephrine and cortisol. These measures were repeated during their third trimester (M=32.4 weeks). Their newborns were then observed during sleep. During both the second and third trimesters, the depressed women had more sleep disturbances and higher depression, anxiety and anger scores. They also had higher norepinephrine and cortisol levels. The newborns of the depressed mothers also had more sleep disturbances including less time in deep sleep and more time in indeterminate (disorganized) sleep, and they were more active and cried/fussed more.     

Saul Rosenzweig's purview: from experimenter/experimentee complementarity to idiodynamics

Following a brief personal biography, an exposition of Saul Rosenzweig's scientific contributions is presented. Starting in 1933 with experimenter/experimentee complementarity, this point of view was extended to implicit common factors in psychotherapy Rosenzweig (1936) then to the complementary pattern of the so-called schools of psychology Rosenzweig (1937). Similarly, converging approaches in personality theory emerged as another type of complementarity Rosenzweig (1944a). The three types of norms-nomothetic, demographic, and idiodynamic-within the range of dynamic human behavior were formulated and led to idiodynamics as a successor to personality theory. This formulation included the concept of the idioverse, defined as a self-creative and experiential population of events, which opened up a methodology (psychoarcheology) for reconstructing the creativity of outstanding scientific and artistic craftsmen like William James and Sigmund Freud, among psychologists, and Henry James, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne among writers of fiction.     

Relations between enabling skills and reading comprehension: a follow-up study of Latvian students from first to second grade

In order to examine the relationships among various phonological skills and reading comprehension, Latvian children were followed from grade 1 to grade 2 and were tested with a battery of phonological, word reading, and reading comprehension tasks. A principal component analysis of the phonological tasks revealed three salient factors: a phonemic awareness factor, a rapid naming factor, and a short-term memory factor. In order to analyze the relationship between various phonological skills and reading comprehension, a structural modeling analysis was performed. Phonemic awareness and rapid naming explained approximately the same amount of unique variance in reading comprehension, but phonemic awareness had most predictive power indirectly via word decoding. Only rapid naming had a significant direct impact on reading comprehension.     

The Structure of Domination Today: A Lacanian View

Two topics determine today's liberal tolerant attitude towards Others: the respect of Otherness and the obsessive fear of harassment: the Other is OK insofar as its presence is not intrusive, insofar as the Other is not really Other. The central human right in late-capitalist society, namely the right to be free from all harassment by the Other including the violent imposition of ethical norms, contrasts sharply with the violent imposition of divine Mosaic law – the Decalogue – from which the idea of human rights ultimately derives. The underlying discursive shift can be analyzed with the help of Lacan: the discourse of the Master had been replaced by university discourse. While the Master's decision is per se violent, university discourse is enunciated from the position of neutral Knowledge. The truth of the university discourse is power: the constitutive lie of the university discourse is that it disavows its performative dimension, presenting what effectively amounts to a political decision based on power as a simple insight into the factual state of things.     

Some Thoughts on Terrorism, Moral Complaint, and the Self-Reflexive and Relational Nature of Morality

The contemporary discussion of terrorism has been dominated by deontological and consequentialist arguments. Building upon my previous work on a paradox concerning moral complaint, I try to broaden the perspectives through which we view the issues. The direction that seems to me as most promising is a self-reflexive, conditional, and, to some extent, relational emphasis. What one is permitted to do to others would depend not so much on some absolute code constraning actions or on the estimate of what would optimize overall the resulting well-being but on the precedents that the past actions of those others provided, on the relationships among the participants, on tacit or explicit offers and possible agreements among them, and on the reciprocity (or lack thereof) that ensues.

Massage therapy improves mood and behavior of students with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder

In the present study, 30 students between the ages of 7 and 18 years (M = 13 years) diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) were randomly assigned to a massage group or a wait-list control group. The massage group received massage therapy for 20 minutes twice per week over the course of one month. The results revealed that massage therapy benefited students with ADHD by improving short-term mood state and longer-term classroom behavior.     

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.