Some Will Admit to Things They Have Not Done
In 1992 The Innocence Project, an American charity, began using DNA evidence to exonerate people. Since then 271 persons have been released from prison for crimes they did not commit, some serving decades behind bars. In spite of their innocence, about a quarter of these people confessed or pled guilty to the crimes for which they were charged.
Researchers have been doing laboratory studies to see why people will confess to something they did not do. A recent study was published in Law and Human Behavior by Saul Kassin and Jennifer Perillo of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. Seventy-one university students were told they were undergoing a test of their reaction times. Participants pressed keys on a keyboard when told by another person who was actually cooperating with the experimenter. The participants were told that pressing the
"ALT" key would crash the computer and destroy the experimental data.
The individual conducting the experiment sat across from the participants at the table.
Unknown to the participants, the computer was set to crash about a minute into the experiment. When the automatic crash occurred, the conductor of the experiment asked the participant if the wrong key was struck, acted upset the data was lost, and asked the participant for a confession.
One participant actually hit the ALT key accidentally, but a quarter of the participants signed a false confession, as they were disarmed and shocked by the accusation.
A similar experiment was conducted by Robert Horselenberg others at Maastricht University, in the Netherlands. Horselenberg and others told 83 participants they were taking part in a taste test for a supermarket chain. The participants were asked to taste ten fizzy drinks and determine which was which. A prize was available to the best taster, an iPod or set of DVDs. The labels of the drinks were obscured by a sock that was pulled up to the rim of the can. All the participants had to do to cheat was pull down the sock.
During the test, ten participants cheated as they were all filmed by a hidden camera. Bafflingly, though, another eight falsely confessed to cheating, even though the admission cost them 50 Euros ($72).
The number of innocent confessors jumps when certain interrogation techniques are added to the test. Several experiments bluff the existence of evidence that proves guilt, an interrogation technique often legal in the USA but banned in Britain.
Although this Netherlands test has not been published yet, a second test by Dr. Kassin and Perillo of the ALT button crash was run in which the experimenter falsely declared to be a witness to the participant hitting the ALT key – and the confession rate jumped to 80% of innocent participants. Dr. Horselenberg has found similar results in his study.
Dr. Kassin also tested bluffing. Two participants, one secretly cooperating with the experimenter, were taking an academic test. Halfway through the test, the investigator stopped the test and accused them of coping each others’ results. The investigator also bluffed that there was a video camera in the room, further bluffing that this evidence would not be available until later. Although the innocent participants should have known that such evidence would exonerate them, half confessed anyway.
Some seemed to sign a confession because there was hard evidence somewhere to prove innocence. Confession ends an unpleasant interrogation. But in many jurisdictions, self-condemnation is quite damning, and frightfully easy to induce.
http://www.economist.com/node/21525840
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