The persuasive power of false confessions

The persuasive power of false confessions

The APS Observer magazine has a fantastic article on the power of false confessions to warp our perception of other evidence in a criminal case to the point where expert witnesses will change their judgements of unrelated evidence to make it fit the false admission of guilt.

We tend to think that no-one would confess to a crime that they didn't commit but there are numerous high profile cases where this has happened and the article notes that "because of advances in DNA evidence, the Innocence Project has been able to exonerate more than 200 people who had been wrongly convicted, 49 of whom had confessed to the crime we now know they didn’t commit."

As a result of some of the early discoveries of false confessions, there is now a growing amount of research on what personal and situational factors trigger false confessions.

The classic book on the topic is forensic psychologist Gisli Gudjonsson's The Psychology Of Interrogations And Confessions. It reviews the scientific evidence but also covers numerous legal cases where false confessions have played a part.

It turns out, people falsely confess to crimes for a wide array of reasons. Some are voluntary confessions where the person might want to gain notoriety, annoy the police or might genuinely believe they've committed the crime due to a delusion in the context of a psychotic mental illness like schizophrenia.

In other cases, a false confession can be triggered by pressure from the police or investigators. Sometimes this happens even when the person doesn't genuinely believe their confession, because they just want to escape the high-pressure situation. In other cases, the psychological pressure leads the person to start doubting their own memories and they come to believe they have committed the crime.

There is now a great deal of research showing that highly suggestible people and people with learning disabilities or mental illnes are much more likely to make a false confession under pressure and police interview guidelines are being changed as a result.

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Full article at the link

http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2009/12/the_persuasive_power.html