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The Unreliability of Confessions

By Stuart Buck

From BPS comes this summary of a study that was just published: Not surprisingly, confessions are extremely persuasive in court, but according to Jessica Klaver and colleagues, all too often these confessions are false, leading to the wrong person being found guilty.Now Klaver's team have used an elegant laboratory task to compare two types of interrogation technique and found that it is so-called 'minimising' questions and remarks - those that downplay the seriousness of the offence, and which blame other people or circumstances - that are the most likely to lead to a false confession.Over two hundred Asian and Caucasian students were invited to take part in what they were told was a test of their personality and typing skills. During the typing part of the task, they were warned in advance that pressing the 'Alt' key would cause the computer to crash and a loss of all data...continue to full post

Full post as published by The Buck Stops Here on January 30, 2008 (boomark / email).