Guilt assessment after retracted voluntary and coerced-compliant confessions in combination with exculpatory or ambiguous evidence |
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| Authors: | Teresa Schneider Melanie Sauerland |
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| Affiliation: | 1. Department of Law, Institute of Criminal Sciences, Philipps-University Marburg, Marburg, Germany;2. Section of Forensic Psychology, Department of Clinical Psychological Science, Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands |
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| Abstract: | We investigated how voluntary confessions, coerced-compliant confessions, and no-confessions influenced guilt assessments in combination with other exculpatory or ambiguous evidence. In three experiments (total N = 808), participants studied case information and provided guilt assessments. As expected, in Experiment 1 and 2a, (i) voluntary confessions to protect a family member elicited stronger guilt attributions than no-confessions and (ii) ambiguous evidence led to stronger guilt attributions than exculpatory evidence. In Experiment 2b, voluntary confessions to protect a group-member (but not to protect a family-member) elicited stronger guilt attributions than no-confessions. Exculpatory eyewitness evidence elicited stronger guilt attributions than exculpatory DNA evidence and participants assigned more weight to exculpatory DNA than eyewitness evidence. Participants were able to discount coerced-compliant confessions when they received information about the interrogations (Experiments 2a/b), but did not consistently consider risk factors for (voluntary) false confessions outside the interrogation room when assessing guilt. |
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| Keywords: | correspondence bias false confessions verdict voluntary blame-taking |
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