False Confessions

[Skeptic]

Aside from the evident problems with polygrapher-fabricated confessions that have been documented in part on this board, false confessions themselves, made under conditions of psychological duress (such as those found in polygraph sessions) are evidently more common than most people think, and have likely resulted in many wrongful convictions.

I'm sure many of us have had the experience of being hounded (by parents, teachers or some other authority figure) on some issue to the point that telling the tormentor what he or she wanted to hear seemed the best option.  I know I have.

Here's an interesting review paper on the topic:

Conti, Richard P., "The Psychology of False Confessions", The Journal of Credibility Assessment and Witness Psychology, Vol. 2, No. 1, 1999, pp 14-36

Skeptic

[Skeptic]

Here are a few more articles:

The Suspect Confessed. Case Closed? Not Necessarily, Researcher Says

The Consequences of False Confessions

The Problem of False Confessions in Illinois

Skeptic

[Marty]

Yes. No question false confessions occur. In fact, looking at the APA study there is nothing even particularly surprising about it. There is a great deal of evidence that shows people adapt their perceptions and even global take on reality to maximize internal consistency. For similar reasons that eyewitnesses are so unreliable, it is most likely that someone could falsely confess to a specific burglary they did not commit if in fact they had done numerous burglaries. They are not absolutely certain they did not commit that specific one as the details of each become co-mingled. OTOH, it is far less likely that someone who has never commited burglary could become convinced, outside of extreme and long term conditioning, that they had in fact done so.

In the case of the typing study, there are defects in the study tieing typing errors to criminal activity. For instance, if the "ALT" key crash paradigm had been different, requiring specific intent (it was always accidental) then it's safe to say the results would have been quite different. For instance, if the person had been warned about the pressing the computer's reset button it would be much harder to convince a person that she had pressed the reset, since the probability of doing it by accident when typing is miniscule.  Extrapolation of those results to major criminal activity is speculative at best.

Now for a rather surprising anecdote on memory. When I was a child, we had a neighbor, a woman born around 1930.  One day it was pointed out that no country had ever used nuclear weapons in war, except of course us.  She became quite indignant, stating in no uncertain terms that the United States would NEVER have used nuclear weapons first and insisted that Japan used them initially when they attacked Pearl Harbor.

While not a particularly educated person she was functional and could read and write. More to the point, she was an adolescent during the time that history was made. It's hard to imagine a less forgetable set of events. I believe that it wasn't a mental defect so much as an alignment of memory to reduce the dissonance created by her memories.

Talk about false memories.  And she didn't even have any facilitators recovering those memories. Did it all on her own.

-Marty

[Marty]

Skeptic,

I'm sure many of us have had the experience of being hounded (by parents, teachers or some other authority figure) on some issue to the point that telling the tormentor what he or she wanted to hear seemed the best option.  I know I have.

Agreed. There is a difference between telling big brother what he wants to hear and coming to love big brother (and believe what you tell him).  The latter seems more pernicious and can have wider consequences.  The biggest risk of false, but firmly believed, memories probably lies more on the witness side but witnesses have long been known to be unreliable, even without "help."

-Marty