problem solving activity untrue confessions answer key

Who is the killer in problem solving activity untrue confessions?

I have 3 suspects based on my observation and hypothesis

Suspects: Gerald McNutt, Leopold Looney and Griselda Cracklin

Gerald McNutt said: "I snatched on of his Bowling trophies from the wall and brought it down on his head." but there is no blood on his chair nor head and the trophy is back on its place and place like nothing is happen

Leopold Looney said: "I'd grabbed the globe-shaped paper weight form the desk and kill him." but there is no blood on his chair nor head either and the globe like shape has no blood stains and it is back were its place before the murder happen

and i think the real suspect is Griselda Cracklin. why?

because he strangled the victim using his scarf and burned it

and i think 2 to 4 hits can cause brain damage and severe bleeding on it

and the 2 suspects that i said there weapon to kills is place back and it had no blood stains and the victims body is sit like its someone strangled him from behind

Romer Ysidore Sapa ∙

Anonymous ∙

I’m guessing it’s either Gerald or Leopold.

Add your answer:

Who was the killer for the case of the hooded murderer problem solving 2?

How do you think the society in which scientists live might influence their views.

Darwinian Theories

Why an empty container can turn into a piece of killer litter when thrown down from a tall building?

Why darkness become the real killer after the asteroids impact on earth.

due to ansha farting which created most of the CO2 and methane

What is happening in the future of forensic science?

The future of forensic science is looking very bright as new doors open every day in the advancement of criminal investigations with forensic science. Just 25 years ago DNA was unable to be used to find a killer. For evidence of this just watch THE CAPTURE OF THE GREEN RIVER KILLER. In this movie, you learn about a killer in a small town that killed about 20 prostitutes in a small town in the early 80s. When the crimes are first commited DNA evidence can be gathered but they are unable to use it to find the murderer. In the late 90s, they learn of the new technique and send frozen samples in to use for this technique. Even though they are years old, the samples provide the much needed evidence to capture the killer that thought he had gotten away with this.

Does anyone remember the program on living tv called 'confessions of a serial killer' and have more info on it?

I posted a link that has the torrents for confessions or a serial killer in the related box below.

What actors and actresses appeared in Confessions of a Priest - 2013?

The cast of Confessions of a Priest - 2013 includes: Elyssa Dufrene as Jogger Jason Mackey as Priest Raymond Scanlon as Killer Lamar Staples as Drunk Driver

What are killer whales social activity?

killer whales are most known for there ability to smoke crack very well

Why and how does Katie in Paranormal Activity 1 becomes bad or the killer?

First of all, she didn't become the killer for a reason ,she was possesed!

A problem that the killer whale would have?

What is the climax in confessions of a murder suspect.

The climax in "Confessions of a Murder Suspect" occurs when the protagonist, Tandy Angel, uncovers the truth about her family and realizes the identity of the real killer. This revelation leads to a pivotal moment of confrontation and resolution that changes the course of the story.

Are cyclones becoming more of a problem?

no, killer rabbits are

What is a sentence for astutely?

Sherlock Holmes was known for solving cases by astute observations.

Where can one see images of a killer sudoku?

Although Sudoku can be fun, it is not an activity that lends itself to "killer images". Try finding a friend interested in Sudoku and discussing interesting games.

Is there a way to increase the number of Natural Killer cells by doing sport activity and if so what is the best sport for doing it?

What are some ennimes to a killer whale.

They don't have any natural enemies. Humans are the only main threat to Killer Whales. This is because of human activity mainly captured for captivity and hunting but as well as ocean pollution.

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Demystifying False Confessions

by Audrey Levitin Director of Development and External Affairs “False confessions are one of the most counter intuitive aspects of human behavior,” says Saul Kassin , a leading expert in the study of false confessions and a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at John Jay College. Professor Kassin’s research helps demystify why people confess to crimes that they did not commit. The term, false confession, is actually a misnomer. A confession is a rational decision by someone who chooses to accept responsibility for his or her actions when the guilt of the crime becomes too much to bear. A false confession is something completely different. When someone falsely confesses, it’s not a one-way conversation and it doesn’t take place during an interview with the police. Rather, it occurs during an interrogation — a totally different type of interaction. It is a largely unknown fact that police are allowed to present false information to extract a confession. Hence, the interrogation process can be disorienting and can cause people to doubt themselves. Also, in an interrogation, the person questioned is considered a suspect — someone who the police already think is guilty. The problem is that the police can be wrong. In his November 12, 2012, review of “The Central Park Five,” Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan said the film “serves as a cinematic primer on what has become one of the most disturbing aspects of our criminal justice system: the ability — and the unabashed willingness — of police to psychologically manipulate people into confessing to things they have not done.” Raymond Santana, who is among the Central Park Five, falsely confessed. Santana recounted in a video for Be the Witness — a campaign launched by The Innocence Project, which helps exonerate wrongfully convicted individuals based on DNA testing — that the officers who interrogated him were friendly at first. But when they didn’t receive the information they wanted, they became aggressive, yelling in his ear. He was 14 years old at the time. Of the Central Park Five, Kassin says, “The kids were interrogated for 14 to 30 hours, the detectives trying to break [them] down into a state of despair, into a state of helplessness, so that . . . [they were] worn down and looking for a way out.” Kassin emphasizes that people who falsely confess nearly always believe that once they are away from the police, the situation can be fixed. In another case, Jeff Deskovic was wrongly convicted of the murder and rape of a classmate, Angela Correa. Deskovic became a suspect because he was late to school the day of the victim’s murder and because he appeared overly distraught at her wake. For two months, he denied having anything to do with Correa’s death. Finally, in late January 1990, he agreed to a polygraph test, which preceded the interrogation that led to his confession. He was held in a small room with no lawyer or parent present. Deskovic’s confession came after six hours, three polygraph sessions and intense questioning by detectives. Like most of the public — and certainly most teenagers — Deskovic did not know that the police are allowed to lie during the interrogation. The 17-year-old told the police what they wanted to hear, believing his statements would later be fixed. “I thought it was all going to be O.K. in the end,” said Deskovic, because he was sure that the DNA testing would show his innocence. In convicting him, the jury chose to give more weight to his tearful confession than to the DNA and other scientific evidence that excluded him from the crime. Kassin says that once a confession is made, everything changes — and it almost doesn’t matter what exculpatory evidence emerges, including DNA, after the confession. “The confession trumps all other evidence. It has to power to change eyewitness identification testimony,” Kassin adds. “Forensic scientists no longer believe their own work and people who provided alibis doubt themselves.” Among the most egregious cases of false confession, George Allen of Missouri was wrongly convicted of a murder that took place in 1982 and spent more than 30 years in prison. The crime took place during one of the heaviest snowstorms in St. Louis history. Allen, who has schizophrenia, had been admitted to psychiatric wards several times. A month after the crime, police officers mistook him for the suspect they were looking for and picked him up. Though they recognized their mistake, police interrogated Allen and an officer prompted him to give answers to fit the crime. He was charged with murder on the basis of the false confession, convicted and sentenced to life. Allen was freed on bond in November of 2012 when a judge vacated his conviction, ruling that police had failed to disclose exculpatory evidence. Allen was fully exonerated in January of this year and reunited with his 80-year-old mother, Lonzetta. It is understood that police are under enormous pressure to solve violent crimes. However, it does not advance justice or public safety for an innocent person to go to prison and a guilty party to go free. For this reason, it’s critical that the American criminal justice system improve how interrogations are conducted. We must avoid long interrogations, deception, leading questions and promises of leniency, and we must record interrogations from beginning to end to prevent false confessions and end this tragic flaw in our criminal justice system.

Thank you for visiting us. You can learn more about how we consider cases here . Please avoid sharing any personal information in the comments below and join us in making this a hate-speech free and safe space for everyone.

D. May 10, 2016 at 7:33 pm Reply Reply

My best friend was made to sign a false confession written by a District Attorney. By harassing the actual victim who was badly injured, life threatening injuries were sustained and he was put in a cell that should have lead to sepsis. After incarceration without representation and no representation for show of cause. He was forced to sign a forced confession. He was never guilty and is now a felon and made to serve a sentence which only was a way for this municipality to get state funding when local law enforcement owns the jails. This is obscene injustice and should be prosecuted for the crime it is and remains until someone decides to put an end to this classist, capitalistic and brutal systems that exists within a county, within a state within the United States. So much for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness when one may be incarcerated, convicted and possibly lose their life at the hands of corruption. To this day it is known and obvious to this state politicians and law enforcement of other counties, even the jailers within the county itself. And no one dare or cares to come forward to aid the innocent. I am in fear of making known my personal self or the victim in this case. I would not even disclose the state without adequate defense as they are that powerful. ALL LIVES MATTER!!

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Inside Interrogation: The Lie, The Bluff, and False Confessions

Original Article
Published: 24 August 2010
Volume 35 , pages 327–337, ( 2011 )

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Jennifer T. Perillo 1 &
Saul M. Kassin 1

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Using a less deceptive variant of the false evidence ploy, interrogators often use the bluff tactic, whereby they pretend to have evidence to be tested without further claiming that it necessarily implicates the suspect. Three experiments were conducted to assess the impact of the bluff on confession rates. Using the Kassin and Kiechel (Psychol Sci 7:125–128, 1996 ) computer crash paradigm, Experiment 1 indicated that bluffing increases false confessions comparable to the effect produced by the presentation of false evidence. Experiment 2 replicated the bluff effect and provided self-reports indicating that innocent participants saw the bluff as a promise of future exoneration which, paradoxically, made it easier to confess. Using a variant of the Russano et al. (Psychol Sci 16:481–486, 2005 ) cheating paradigm, Experiment 3 replicated the bluff effect on innocent suspects once again, though a ceiling effect was obtained in the guilty condition. Results suggest that the phenomenology of innocence can lead innocents to confess even in response to relatively benign interrogation tactics.

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And Nothing but the Truth: an Exploration of Perjury

Stephanie D. Crank & Drew A. Curtis

problem solving activity untrue confessions answer key

False Confessions: From Colonial Salem, Through Central Park, and into the Twenty-First Century

Lies and Decision Making

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Acknowledgments

The research reported in this manuscript was supported by funds from the City University of New York to the second author. We are indebted to Jennifer Schell for her invaluable role as experimenter in Study 3. We also want to thank Amanda Baird, Rebecca Dryden-Shepherd, and Vanessa Materko, for their role as confederates.

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Perillo, J.T., Kassin, S.M. Inside Interrogation: The Lie, The Bluff, and False Confessions. Law Hum Behav 35 , 327–337 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10979-010-9244-2

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Published : 24 August 2010

Issue Date : August 2011

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s10979-010-9244-2

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How to improve your problem solving skills and build effective problem solving strategies

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What is a problem solving process?

What are the problem solving steps I need to follow?

Problem solving strategies

What skills do i need to be an effective problem solver, how can i improve my problem solving skills.

Solving problems is like baking a cake. You can go straight into the kitchen without a recipe or the right ingredients and do your best, but the end result is unlikely to be very tasty!

Using a process to bake a cake allows you to use the best ingredients without waste, collect the right tools, account for allergies, decide whether it is a birthday or wedding cake, and then bake efficiently and on time. The result is a better cake that is fit for purpose, tastes better and has created less mess in the kitchen. Also, it should have chocolate sprinkles. Having a step by step process to solve organizational problems allows you to go through each stage methodically and ensure you are trying to solve the right problems and select the most appropriate, effective solutions.

What are the problem solving steps I need to follow?

All problem solving processes go through a number of steps in order to move from identifying a problem to resolving it.

Depending on your problem solving model and who you ask, there can be anything between four and nine problem solving steps you should follow in order to find the right solution. Whatever framework you and your group use, there are some key items that should be addressed in order to have an effective process.

We’ve looked at problem solving processes from sources such as the American Society for Quality and their four step approach , and Mediate ‘s six step process. By reflecting on those and our own problem solving processes, we’ve come up with a sequence of seven problem solving steps we feel best covers everything you need in order to effectively solve problems.

1. Problem identification

The first stage of any problem solving process is to identify the problem or problems you might want to solve. Effective problem solving strategies always begin by allowing a group scope to articulate what they believe the problem to be and then coming to some consensus over which problem they approach first. Problem solving activities used at this stage often have a focus on creating frank, open discussion so that potential problems can be brought to the surface.

2. Problem analysis

Though this step is not a million miles from problem identification, problem analysis deserves to be considered separately. It can often be an overlooked part of the process and is instrumental when it comes to developing effective solutions.

The process of problem analysis means ensuring that the problem you are seeking to solve is the right problem . As part of this stage, you may look deeper and try to find the root cause of a specific problem at a team or organizational level.

Remember that problem solving strategies should not only be focused on putting out fires in the short term but developing long term solutions that deal with the root cause of organizational challenges.

Whatever your approach, analyzing a problem is crucial in being able to select an appropriate solution and the problem solving skills deployed in this stage are beneficial for the rest of the process and ensuring the solutions you create are fit for purpose.

3. Solution generation

Once your group has nailed down the particulars of the problem you wish to solve, you want to encourage a free flow of ideas connecting to solving that problem. This can take the form of problem solving games that encourage creative thinking or problem solving activities designed to produce working prototypes of possible solutions.

The key to ensuring the success of this stage of the problem solving process is to encourage quick, creative thinking and create an open space where all ideas are considered. The best solutions can come from unlikely places and by using problem solving techniques that celebrate invention, you might come up with solution gold.

4. Solution development

No solution is likely to be perfect right out of the gate. It’s important to discuss and develop the solutions your group has come up with over the course of following the previous problem solving steps in order to arrive at the best possible solution. Problem solving games used in this stage involve lots of critical thinking, measuring potential effort and impact, and looking at possible solutions analytically.

During this stage, you will often ask your team to iterate and improve upon your frontrunning solutions and develop them further. Remember that problem solving strategies always benefit from a multitude of voices and opinions, and not to let ego get involved when it comes to choosing which solutions to develop and take further.

Finding the best solution is the goal of all problem solving workshops and here is the place to ensure that your solution is well thought out, sufficiently robust and fit for purpose.

5. Decision making

Nearly there! Once your group has reached consensus and selected a solution that applies to the problem at hand you have some decisions to make. You will want to work on allocating ownership of the project, figure out who will do what, how the success of the solution will be measured and decide the next course of action.

The decision making stage is a part of the problem solving process that can get missed or taken as for granted. Fail to properly allocate roles and plan out how a solution will actually be implemented and it less likely to be successful in solving the problem.

Have clear accountabilities, actions, timeframes, and follow-ups. Make these decisions and set clear next-steps in the problem solving workshop so that everyone is aligned and you can move forward effectively as a group.

Ensuring that you plan for the roll-out of a solution is one of the most important problem solving steps. Without adequate planning or oversight, it can prove impossible to measure success or iterate further if the problem was not solved.

6. Solution implementation

This is what we were waiting for! All problem solving strategies have the end goal of implementing a solution and solving a problem in mind.

Remember that in order for any solution to be successful, you need to help your group through all of the previous problem solving steps thoughtfully. Only then can you ensure that you are solving the right problem but also that you have developed the correct solution and can then successfully implement and measure the impact of that solution.

Project management and communication skills are key here – your solution may need to adjust when out in the wild or you might discover new challenges along the way.

7. Solution evaluation

So you and your team developed a great solution to a problem and have a gut feeling its been solved. Work done, right? Wrong. All problem solving strategies benefit from evaluation, consideration, and feedback. You might find that the solution does not work for everyone, might create new problems, or is potentially so successful that you will want to roll it out to larger teams or as part of other initiatives.

None of that is possible without taking the time to evaluate the success of the solution you developed in your problem solving model and adjust if necessary.

Remember that the problem solving process is often iterative and it can be common to not solve complex issues on the first try. Even when this is the case, you and your team will have generated learning that will be important for future problem solving workshops or in other parts of the organization.

It’s worth underlining how important record keeping is throughout the problem solving process. If a solution didn’t work, you need to have the data and records to see why that was the case. If you go back to the drawing board, notes from the previous workshop can help save time. Data and insight is invaluable at every stage of the problem solving process and this one is no different.

Problem solving workshops made easy

Problem solving strategies are methods of approaching and facilitating the process of problem-solving with a set of techniques , actions, and processes. Different strategies are more effective if you are trying to solve broad problems such as achieving higher growth versus more focused problems like, how do we improve our customer onboarding process?

Broadly, the problem solving steps outlined above should be included in any problem solving strategy though choosing where to focus your time and what approaches should be taken is where they begin to differ. You might find that some strategies ask for the problem identification to be done prior to the session or that everything happens in the course of a one day workshop.

The key similarity is that all good problem solving strategies are structured and designed. Four hours of open discussion is never going to be as productive as a four-hour workshop designed to lead a group through a problem solving process.

Good problem solving strategies are tailored to the team, organization and problem you will be attempting to solve. Here are some example problem solving strategies you can learn from or use to get started.

Use a workshop to lead a team through a group process

Often, the first step to solving problems or organizational challenges is bringing a group together effectively. Most teams have the tools, knowledge, and expertise necessary to solve their challenges – they just need some guidance in how to use leverage those skills and a structure and format that allows people to focus their energies.

Facilitated workshops are one of the most effective ways of solving problems of any scale. By designing and planning your workshop carefully, you can tailor the approach and scope to best fit the needs of your team and organization.

Problem solving workshop

Creating a bespoke, tailored process
Tackling problems of any size
Building in-house workshop ability and encouraging their use

Workshops are an effective strategy for solving problems. By using tried and test facilitation techniques and methods, you can design and deliver a workshop that is perfectly suited to the unique variables of your organization. You may only have the capacity for a half-day workshop and so need a problem solving process to match.

By using our session planner tool and importing methods from our library of 700+ facilitation techniques, you can create the right problem solving workshop for your team. It might be that you want to encourage creative thinking or look at things from a new angle to unblock your groups approach to problem solving. By tailoring your workshop design to the purpose, you can help ensure great results.

One of the main benefits of a workshop is the structured approach to problem solving. Not only does this mean that the workshop itself will be successful, but many of the methods and techniques will help your team improve their working processes outside of the workshop.

We believe that workshops are one of the best tools you can use to improve the way your team works together. Start with a problem solving workshop and then see what team building, culture or design workshops can do for your organization!

Run a design sprint

Great for:

aligning large, multi-discipline teams
quickly designing and testing solutions
tackling large, complex organizational challenges and breaking them down into smaller tasks

By using design thinking principles and methods, a design sprint is a great way of identifying, prioritizing and prototyping solutions to long term challenges that can help solve major organizational problems with quick action and measurable results.

Some familiarity with design thinking is useful, though not integral, and this strategy can really help a team align if there is some discussion around which problems should be approached first.

The stage-based structure of the design sprint is also very useful for teams new to design thinking. The inspiration phase, where you look to competitors that have solved your problem, and the rapid prototyping and testing phases are great for introducing new concepts that will benefit a team in all their future work.

It can be common for teams to look inward for solutions and so looking to the market for solutions you can iterate on can be very productive. Instilling an agile prototyping and testing mindset can also be great when helping teams move forwards – generating and testing solutions quickly can help save time in the long run and is also pretty exciting!

Break problems down into smaller issues

Organizational challenges and problems are often complicated and large scale in nature. Sometimes, trying to resolve such an issue in one swoop is simply unachievable or overwhelming. Try breaking down such problems into smaller issues that you can work on step by step. You may not be able to solve the problem of churning customers off the bat, but you can work with your team to identify smaller effort but high impact elements and work on those first.

This problem solving strategy can help a team generate momentum, prioritize and get some easy wins. It’s also a great strategy to employ with teams who are just beginning to learn how to approach the problem solving process. If you want some insight into a way to employ this strategy, we recommend looking at our design sprint template below!

Use guiding frameworks or try new methodologies

Some problems are best solved by introducing a major shift in perspective or by using new methodologies that encourage your team to think differently.

Props and tools such as Methodkit , which uses a card-based toolkit for facilitation, or Lego Serious Play can be great ways to engage your team and find an inclusive, democratic problem solving strategy. Remember that play and creativity are great tools for achieving change and whatever the challenge, engaging your participants can be very effective where other strategies may have failed.

LEGO Serious Play

Improving core problem solving skills
Thinking outside of the box
Encouraging creative solutions

LEGO Serious Play is a problem solving methodology designed to get participants thinking differently by using 3D models and kinesthetic learning styles. By physically building LEGO models based on questions and exercises, participants are encouraged to think outside of the box and create their own responses.

Collaborate LEGO Serious Play exercises are also used to encourage communication and build problem solving skills in a group. By using this problem solving process, you can often help different kinds of learners and personality types contribute and unblock organizational problems with creative thinking.

Problem solving strategies like LEGO Serious Play are super effective at helping a team solve more skills-based problems such as communication between teams or a lack of creative thinking. Some problems are not suited to LEGO Serious Play and require a different problem solving strategy.

Card Decks and Method Kits

New facilitators or non-facilitators
Approaching difficult subjects with a simple, creative framework
Engaging those with varied learning styles

Card decks and method kids are great tools for those new to facilitation or for whom facilitation is not the primary role. Card decks such as the emotional culture deck can be used for complete workshops and in many cases, can be used right out of the box. Methodkit has a variety of kits designed for scenarios ranging from personal development through to personas and global challenges so you can find the right deck for your particular needs.

Having an easy to use framework that encourages creativity or a new approach can take some of the friction or planning difficulties out of the workshop process and energize a team in any setting. Simplicity is the key with these methods. By ensuring everyone on your team can get involved and engage with the process as quickly as possible can really contribute to the success of your problem solving strategy.

Source external advice

Looking to peers, experts and external facilitators can be a great way of approaching the problem solving process. Your team may not have the necessary expertise, insights of experience to tackle some issues, or you might simply benefit from a fresh perspective. Some problems may require bringing together an entire team, and coaching managers or team members individually might be the right approach. Remember that not all problems are best resolved in the same manner.

If you’re a solo entrepreneur, peer groups, coaches and mentors can also be invaluable at not only solving specific business problems, but in providing a support network for resolving future challenges. One great approach is to join a Mastermind Group and link up with like-minded individuals and all grow together. Remember that however you approach the sourcing of external advice, do so thoughtfully, respectfully and honestly. Reciprocate where you can and prepare to be surprised by just how kind and helpful your peers can be!

Mastermind Group

Solo entrepreneurs or small teams with low capacity
Peer learning and gaining outside expertise
Getting multiple external points of view quickly

Problem solving in large organizations with lots of skilled team members is one thing, but how about if you work for yourself or in a very small team without the capacity to get the most from a design sprint or LEGO Serious Play session?

A mastermind group – sometimes known as a peer advisory board – is where a group of people come together to support one another in their own goals, challenges, and businesses. Each participant comes to the group with their own purpose and the other members of the group will help them create solutions, brainstorm ideas, and support one another.

Mastermind groups are very effective in creating an energized, supportive atmosphere that can deliver meaningful results. Learning from peers from outside of your organization or industry can really help unlock new ways of thinking and drive growth. Access to the experience and skills of your peers can be invaluable in helping fill the gaps in your own ability, particularly in young companies.

A mastermind group is a great solution for solo entrepreneurs, small teams, or for organizations that feel that external expertise or fresh perspectives will be beneficial for them. It is worth noting that Mastermind groups are often only as good as the participants and what they can bring to the group. Participants need to be committed, engaged and understand how to work in this context.

Coaching and mentoring

Focused learning and development
Filling skills gaps
Working on a range of challenges over time

Receiving advice from a business coach or building a mentor/mentee relationship can be an effective way of resolving certain challenges. The one-to-one format of most coaching and mentor relationships can really help solve the challenges those individuals are having and benefit the organization as a result.

A great mentor can be invaluable when it comes to spotting potential problems before they arise and coming to understand a mentee very well has a host of other business benefits. You might run an internal mentorship program to help develop your team’s problem solving skills and strategies or as part of a large learning and development program. External coaches can also be an important part of your problem solving strategy, filling skills gaps for your management team or helping with specific business issues.

Now we’ve explored the problem solving process and the steps you will want to go through in order to have an effective session, let’s look at the skills you and your team need to be more effective problem solvers.

Problem solving skills are highly sought after, whatever industry or team you work in. Organizations are keen to employ people who are able to approach problems thoughtfully and find strong, realistic solutions. Whether you are a facilitator , a team leader or a developer, being an effective problem solver is a skill you’ll want to develop.

Problem solving skills form a whole suite of techniques and approaches that an individual uses to not only identify problems but to discuss them productively before then developing appropriate solutions.

Here are some of the most important problem solving skills everyone from executives to junior staff members should learn. We’ve also included an activity or exercise from the SessionLab library that can help you and your team develop that skill.

If you’re running a workshop or training session to try and improve problem solving skills in your team, try using these methods to supercharge your process!

Active listening

Active listening is one of the most important skills anyone who works with people can possess. In short, active listening is a technique used to not only better understand what is being said by an individual, but also to be more aware of the underlying message the speaker is trying to convey. When it comes to problem solving, active listening is integral for understanding the position of every participant and to clarify the challenges, ideas and solutions they bring to the table.

Some active listening skills include:

Paying complete attention to the speaker.
Removing distractions.
Avoid interruption.
Taking the time to fully understand before preparing a rebuttal.
Responding respectfully and appropriately.
Demonstrate attentiveness and positivity with an open posture, making eye contact with the speaker, smiling and nodding if appropriate. Show that you are listening and encourage them to continue.
Be aware of and respectful of feelings. Judge the situation and respond appropriately. You can disagree without being disrespectful.
Observe body language.
Paraphrase what was said in your own words, either mentally or verbally.
Remain neutral.
Reflect and take a moment before responding.
Ask deeper questions based on what is said and clarify points where necessary.

Active Listening #hyperisland #skills #active listening #remote-friendly This activity supports participants to reflect on a question and generate their own solutions using simple principles of active listening and peer coaching. It’s an excellent introduction to active listening but can also be used with groups that are already familiar with it. Participants work in groups of three and take turns being: “the subject”, the listener, and the observer.

Analytical skills

All problem solving models require strong analytical skills, particularly during the beginning of the process and when it comes to analyzing how solutions have performed.

Analytical skills are primarily focused on performing an effective analysis by collecting, studying and parsing data related to a problem or opportunity.

It often involves spotting patterns, being able to see things from different perspectives and using observable facts and data to make suggestions or produce insight.

Analytical skills are also important at every stage of the problem solving process and by having these skills, you can ensure that any ideas or solutions you create or backed up analytically and have been sufficiently thought out.

Nine Whys #innovation #issue analysis #liberating structures With breathtaking simplicity, you can rapidly clarify for individuals and a group what is essentially important in their work. You can quickly reveal when a compelling purpose is missing in a gathering and avoid moving forward without clarity. When a group discovers an unambiguous shared purpose, more freedom and more responsibility are unleashed. You have laid the foundation for spreading and scaling innovations with fidelity.

Collaboration

Trying to solve problems on your own is difficult. Being able to collaborate effectively, with a free exchange of ideas, to delegate and be a productive member of a team is hugely important to all problem solving strategies.

Remember that whatever your role, collaboration is integral, and in a problem solving process, you are all working together to find the best solution for everyone.

Marshmallow challenge with debriefing #teamwork #team #leadership #collaboration In eighteen minutes, teams must build the tallest free-standing structure out of 20 sticks of spaghetti, one yard of tape, one yard of string, and one marshmallow. The marshmallow needs to be on top. The Marshmallow Challenge was developed by Tom Wujec, who has done the activity with hundreds of groups around the world. Visit the Marshmallow Challenge website for more information. This version has an extra debriefing question added with sample questions focusing on roles within the team.

Communication

Being an effective communicator means being empathetic, clear and succinct, asking the right questions, and demonstrating active listening skills throughout any discussion or meeting.

In a problem solving setting, you need to communicate well in order to progress through each stage of the process effectively. As a team leader, it may also fall to you to facilitate communication between parties who may not see eye to eye. Effective communication also means helping others to express themselves and be heard in a group.

Bus Trip #feedback #communication #appreciation #closing #thiagi #team This is one of my favourite feedback games. I use Bus Trip at the end of a training session or a meeting, and I use it all the time. The game creates a massive amount of energy with lots of smiles, laughs, and sometimes even a teardrop or two.

Creative problem solving skills can be some of the best tools in your arsenal. Thinking creatively, being able to generate lots of ideas and come up with out of the box solutions is useful at every step of the process.

The kinds of problems you will likely discuss in a problem solving workshop are often difficult to solve, and by approaching things in a fresh, creative manner, you can often create more innovative solutions.

Having practical creative skills is also a boon when it comes to problem solving. If you can help create quality design sketches and prototypes in record time, it can help bring a team to alignment more quickly or provide a base for further iteration.

The paper clip method #sharing #creativity #warm up #idea generation #brainstorming The power of brainstorming. A training for project leaders, creativity training, and to catalyse getting new solutions.

Critical thinking

Critical thinking is one of the fundamental problem solving skills you’ll want to develop when working on developing solutions. Critical thinking is the ability to analyze, rationalize and evaluate while being aware of personal bias, outlying factors and remaining open-minded.

Defining and analyzing problems without deploying critical thinking skills can mean you and your team go down the wrong path. Developing solutions to complex issues requires critical thinking too – ensuring your team considers all possibilities and rationally evaluating them.

Agreement-Certainty Matrix #issue analysis #liberating structures #problem solving You can help individuals or groups avoid the frequent mistake of trying to solve a problem with methods that are not adapted to the nature of their challenge. The combination of two questions makes it possible to easily sort challenges into four categories: simple, complicated, complex , and chaotic . A problem is simple when it can be solved reliably with practices that are easy to duplicate. It is complicated when experts are required to devise a sophisticated solution that will yield the desired results predictably. A problem is complex when there are several valid ways to proceed but outcomes are not predictable in detail. Chaotic is when the context is too turbulent to identify a path forward. A loose analogy may be used to describe these differences: simple is like following a recipe, complicated like sending a rocket to the moon, complex like raising a child, and chaotic is like the game “Pin the Tail on the Donkey.” The Liberating Structures Matching Matrix in Chapter 5 can be used as the first step to clarify the nature of a challenge and avoid the mismatches between problems and solutions that are frequently at the root of chronic, recurring problems.

Data analysis

Though it shares lots of space with general analytical skills, data analysis skills are something you want to cultivate in their own right in order to be an effective problem solver.

Being good at data analysis doesn’t just mean being able to find insights from data, but also selecting the appropriate data for a given issue, interpreting it effectively and knowing how to model and present that data. Depending on the problem at hand, it might also include a working knowledge of specific data analysis tools and procedures.

Having a solid grasp of data analysis techniques is useful if you’re leading a problem solving workshop but if you’re not an expert, don’t worry. Bring people into the group who has this skill set and help your team be more effective as a result.

Decision making

All problems need a solution and all solutions require that someone make the decision to implement them. Without strong decision making skills, teams can become bogged down in discussion and less effective as a result.

Making decisions is a key part of the problem solving process. It’s important to remember that decision making is not restricted to the leadership team. Every staff member makes decisions every day and developing these skills ensures that your team is able to solve problems at any scale. Remember that making decisions does not mean leaping to the first solution but weighing up the options and coming to an informed, well thought out solution to any given problem that works for the whole team.

Lightning Decision Jam (LDJ) #action #decision making #problem solving #issue analysis #innovation #design #remote-friendly The problem with anything that requires creative thinking is that it’s easy to get lost—lose focus and fall into the trap of having useless, open-ended, unstructured discussions. Here’s the most effective solution I’ve found: Replace all open, unstructured discussion with a clear process. What to use this exercise for: Anything which requires a group of people to make decisions, solve problems or discuss challenges. It’s always good to frame an LDJ session with a broad topic, here are some examples: The conversion flow of our checkout Our internal design process How we organise events Keeping up with our competition Improving sales flow

Dependability

Most complex organizational problems require multiple people to be involved in delivering the solution. Ensuring that the team and organization can depend on you to take the necessary actions and communicate where necessary is key to ensuring problems are solved effectively.

Being dependable also means working to deadlines and to brief. It is often a matter of creating trust in a team so that everyone can depend on one another to complete the agreed actions in the agreed time frame so that the team can move forward together. Being undependable can create problems of friction and can limit the effectiveness of your solutions so be sure to bear this in mind throughout a project.

Team Purpose & Culture #team #hyperisland #culture #remote-friendly This is an essential process designed to help teams define their purpose (why they exist) and their culture (how they work together to achieve that purpose). Defining these two things will help any team to be more focused and aligned. With support of tangible examples from other companies, the team members work as individuals and a group to codify the way they work together. The goal is a visual manifestation of both the purpose and culture that can be put up in the team’s work space.

Emotional intelligence

Emotional intelligence is an important skill for any successful team member, whether communicating internally or with clients or users. In the problem solving process, emotional intelligence means being attuned to how people are feeling and thinking, communicating effectively and being self-aware of what you bring to a room.

There are often differences of opinion when working through problem solving processes, and it can be easy to let things become impassioned or combative. Developing your emotional intelligence means being empathetic to your colleagues and managing your own emotions throughout the problem and solution process. Be kind, be thoughtful and put your points across care and attention.

Being emotionally intelligent is a skill for life and by deploying it at work, you can not only work efficiently but empathetically. Check out the emotional culture workshop template for more!

Facilitation

As we’ve clarified in our facilitation skills post, facilitation is the art of leading people through processes towards agreed-upon objectives in a manner that encourages participation, ownership, and creativity by all those involved. While facilitation is a set of interrelated skills in itself, the broad definition of facilitation can be invaluable when it comes to problem solving. Leading a team through a problem solving process is made more effective if you improve and utilize facilitation skills – whether you’re a manager, team leader or external stakeholder.

The Six Thinking Hats #creative thinking #meeting facilitation #problem solving #issue resolution #idea generation #conflict resolution The Six Thinking Hats are used by individuals and groups to separate out conflicting styles of thinking. They enable and encourage a group of people to think constructively together in exploring and implementing change, rather than using argument to fight over who is right and who is wrong.

Flexibility

Being flexible is a vital skill when it comes to problem solving. This does not mean immediately bowing to pressure or changing your opinion quickly: instead, being flexible is all about seeing things from new perspectives, receiving new information and factoring it into your thought process.

Flexibility is also important when it comes to rolling out solutions. It might be that other organizational projects have greater priority or require the same resources as your chosen solution. Being flexible means understanding needs and challenges across the team and being open to shifting or arranging your own schedule as necessary. Again, this does not mean immediately making way for other projects. It’s about articulating your own needs, understanding the needs of others and being able to come to a meaningful compromise.

The Creativity Dice #creativity #problem solving #thiagi #issue analysis Too much linear thinking is hazardous to creative problem solving. To be creative, you should approach the problem (or the opportunity) from different points of view. You should leave a thought hanging in mid-air and move to another. This skipping around prevents premature closure and lets your brain incubate one line of thought while you consciously pursue another.

Working in any group can lead to unconscious elements of groupthink or situations in which you may not wish to be entirely honest. Disagreeing with the opinions of the executive team or wishing to save the feelings of a coworker can be tricky to navigate, but being honest is absolutely vital when to comes to developing effective solutions and ensuring your voice is heard.

Remember that being honest does not mean being brutally candid. You can deliver your honest feedback and opinions thoughtfully and without creating friction by using other skills such as emotional intelligence.

Explore your Values #hyperisland #skills #values #remote-friendly Your Values is an exercise for participants to explore what their most important values are. It’s done in an intuitive and rapid way to encourage participants to follow their intuitive feeling rather than over-thinking and finding the “correct” values. It is a good exercise to use to initiate reflection and dialogue around personal values.

Initiative

The problem solving process is multi-faceted and requires different approaches at certain points of the process. Taking initiative to bring problems to the attention of the team, collect data or lead the solution creating process is always valuable. You might even roadtest your own small scale solutions or brainstorm before a session. Taking initiative is particularly effective if you have good deal of knowledge in that area or have ownership of a particular project and want to get things kickstarted.

That said, be sure to remember to honor the process and work in service of the team. If you are asked to own one part of the problem solving process and you don’t complete that task because your initiative leads you to work on something else, that’s not an effective method of solving business challenges.

15% Solutions #action #liberating structures #remote-friendly You can reveal the actions, however small, that everyone can do immediately. At a minimum, these will create momentum, and that may make a BIG difference. 15% Solutions show that there is no reason to wait around, feel powerless, or fearful. They help people pick it up a level. They get individuals and the group to focus on what is within their discretion instead of what they cannot change. With a very simple question, you can flip the conversation to what can be done and find solutions to big problems that are often distributed widely in places not known in advance. Shifting a few grains of sand may trigger a landslide and change the whole landscape.

Impartiality

A particularly useful problem solving skill for product owners or managers is the ability to remain impartial throughout much of the process. In practice, this means treating all points of view and ideas brought forward in a meeting equally and ensuring that your own areas of interest or ownership are not favored over others.

There may be a stage in the process where a decision maker has to weigh the cost and ROI of possible solutions against the company roadmap though even then, ensuring that the decision made is based on merit and not personal opinion.

Empathy map #frame insights #create #design #issue analysis An empathy map is a tool to help a design team to empathize with the people they are designing for. You can make an empathy map for a group of people or for a persona. To be used after doing personas when more insights are needed.

Being a good leader means getting a team aligned, energized and focused around a common goal. In the problem solving process, strong leadership helps ensure that the process is efficient, that any conflicts are resolved and that a team is managed in the direction of success.

It’s common for managers or executives to assume this role in a problem solving workshop, though it’s important that the leader maintains impartiality and does not bulldoze the group in a particular direction. Remember that good leadership means working in service of the purpose and team and ensuring the workshop is a safe space for employees of any level to contribute. Take a look at our leadership games and activities post for more exercises and methods to help improve leadership in your organization.

Leadership Pizza #leadership #team #remote-friendly This leadership development activity offers a self-assessment framework for people to first identify what skills, attributes and attitudes they find important for effective leadership, and then assess their own development and initiate goal setting.

In the context of problem solving, mediation is important in keeping a team engaged, happy and free of conflict. When leading or facilitating a problem solving workshop, you are likely to run into differences of opinion. Depending on the nature of the problem, certain issues may be brought up that are emotive in nature.

Being an effective mediator means helping those people on either side of such a divide are heard, listen to one another and encouraged to find common ground and a resolution. Mediating skills are useful for leaders and managers in many situations and the problem solving process is no different.

Conflict Responses #hyperisland #team #issue resolution A workshop for a team to reflect on past conflicts, and use them to generate guidelines for effective conflict handling. The workshop uses the Thomas-Killman model of conflict responses to frame a reflective discussion. Use it to open up a discussion around conflict with a team.

Planning

Solving organizational problems is much more effective when following a process or problem solving model. Planning skills are vital in order to structure, deliver and follow-through on a problem solving workshop and ensure your solutions are intelligently deployed.

Planning skills include the ability to organize tasks and a team, plan and design the process and take into account any potential challenges. Taking the time to plan carefully can save time and frustration later in the process and is valuable for ensuring a team is positioned for success.

3 Action Steps #hyperisland #action #remote-friendly This is a small-scale strategic planning session that helps groups and individuals to take action toward a desired change. It is often used at the end of a workshop or programme. The group discusses and agrees on a vision, then creates some action steps that will lead them towards that vision. The scope of the challenge is also defined, through discussion of the helpful and harmful factors influencing the group.

Prioritization

As organisations grow, the scale and variation of problems they face multiplies. Your team or is likely to face numerous challenges in different areas and so having the skills to analyze and prioritize becomes very important, particularly for those in leadership roles.

A thorough problem solving process is likely to deliver multiple solutions and you may have several different problems you wish to solve simultaneously. Prioritization is the ability to measure the importance, value, and effectiveness of those possible solutions and choose which to enact and in what order. The process of prioritization is integral in ensuring the biggest challenges are addressed with the most impactful solutions.

Impact and Effort Matrix #gamestorming #decision making #action #remote-friendly In this decision-making exercise, possible actions are mapped based on two factors: effort required to implement and potential impact. Categorizing ideas along these lines is a useful technique in decision making, as it obliges contributors to balance and evaluate suggested actions before committing to them.

Project management

Some problem solving skills are utilized in a workshop or ideation phases, while others come in useful when it comes to decision making. Overseeing an entire problem solving process and ensuring its success requires strong project management skills.

While project management incorporates many of the other skills listed here, it is important to note the distinction of considering all of the factors of a project and managing them successfully. Being able to negotiate with stakeholders, manage tasks, time and people, consider costs and ROI, and tie everything together is massively helpful when going through the problem solving process.

Record keeping

Working out meaningful solutions to organizational challenges is only one part of the process. Thoughtfully documenting and keeping records of each problem solving step for future consultation is important in ensuring efficiency and meaningful change.

For example, some problems may be lower priority than others but can be revisited in the future. If the team has ideated on solutions and found some are not up to the task, record those so you can rule them out and avoiding repeating work. Keeping records of the process also helps you improve and refine your problem solving model next time around!

Personal Kanban #gamestorming #action #agile #project planning Personal Kanban is a tool for organizing your work to be more efficient and productive. It is based on agile methods and principles.

Research skills

Conducting research to support both the identification of problems and the development of appropriate solutions is important for an effective process. Knowing where to go to collect research, how to conduct research efficiently, and identifying pieces of research are relevant are all things a good researcher can do well.

In larger groups, not everyone has to demonstrate this ability in order for a problem solving workshop to be effective. That said, having people with research skills involved in the process, particularly if they have existing area knowledge, can help ensure the solutions that are developed with data that supports their intention. Remember that being able to deliver the results of research efficiently and in a way the team can easily understand is also important. The best data in the world is only as effective as how it is delivered and interpreted.

Customer experience map #ideation #concepts #research #design #issue analysis #remote-friendly Customer experience mapping is a method of documenting and visualizing the experience a customer has as they use the product or service. It also maps out their responses to their experiences. To be used when there is a solution (even in a conceptual stage) that can be analyzed.

Risk management

Managing risk is an often overlooked part of the problem solving process. Solutions are often developed with the intention of reducing exposure to risk or solving issues that create risk but sometimes, great solutions are more experimental in nature and as such, deploying them needs to be carefully considered.

Managing risk means acknowledging that there may be risks associated with more out of the box solutions or trying new things, but that this must be measured against the possible benefits and other organizational factors.

Be informed, get the right data and stakeholders in the room and you can appropriately factor risk into your decision making process.

Decisions, Decisions… #communication #decision making #thiagi #action #issue analysis When it comes to decision-making, why are some of us more prone to take risks while others are risk-averse? One explanation might be the way the decision and options were presented. This exercise, based on Kahneman and Tversky’s classic study , illustrates how the framing effect influences our judgement and our ability to make decisions . The participants are divided into two groups. Both groups are presented with the same problem and two alternative programs for solving them. The two programs both have the same consequences but are presented differently. The debriefing discussion examines how the framing of the program impacted the participant’s decision.

Team-building

No single person is as good at problem solving as a team. Building an effective team and helping them come together around a common purpose is one of the most important problem solving skills, doubly so for leaders. By bringing a team together and helping them work efficiently, you pave the way for team ownership of a problem and the development of effective solutions.

In a problem solving workshop, it can be tempting to jump right into the deep end, though taking the time to break the ice, energize the team and align them with a game or exercise will pay off over the course of the day.

Remember that you will likely go through the problem solving process multiple times over an organization’s lifespan and building a strong team culture will make future problem solving more effective. It’s also great to work with people you know, trust and have fun with. Working on team building in and out of the problem solving process is a hallmark of successful teams that can work together to solve business problems.

9 Dimensions Team Building Activity #ice breaker #teambuilding #team #remote-friendly 9 Dimensions is a powerful activity designed to build relationships and trust among team members. There are 2 variations of this icebreaker. The first version is for teams who want to get to know each other better. The second version is for teams who want to explore how they are working together as a team.

Time management

The problem solving process is designed to lead a team from identifying a problem through to delivering a solution and evaluating its effectiveness. Without effective time management skills or timeboxing of tasks, it can be easy for a team to get bogged down or be inefficient.

By using a problem solving model and carefully designing your workshop, you can allocate time efficiently and trust that the process will deliver the results you need in a good timeframe.

Time management also comes into play when it comes to rolling out solutions, particularly those that are experimental in nature. Having a clear timeframe for implementing and evaluating solutions is vital for ensuring their success and being able to pivot if necessary.

Improving your skills at problem solving is often a career-long pursuit though there are methods you can use to make the learning process more efficient and to supercharge your problem solving skillset.

Remember that the skills you need to be a great problem solver have a large overlap with those skills you need to be effective in any role. Investing time and effort to develop your active listening or critical thinking skills is valuable in any context. Here are 7 ways to improve your problem solving skills.

Share best practices

Remember that your team is an excellent source of skills, wisdom, and techniques and that you should all take advantage of one another where possible. Best practices that one team has for solving problems, conducting research or making decisions should be shared across the organization. If you have in-house staff that have done active listening training or are data analysis pros, have them lead a training session.

Your team is one of your best resources. Create space and internal processes for the sharing of skills so that you can all grow together.

Ask for help and attend training

Once you’ve figured out you have a skills gap, the next step is to take action to fill that skills gap. That might be by asking your superior for training or coaching, or liaising with team members with that skill set. You might even attend specialized training for certain skills – active listening or critical thinking, for example, are business-critical skills that are regularly offered as part of a training scheme.

Whatever method you choose, remember that taking action of some description is necessary for growth. Whether that means practicing, getting help, attending training or doing some background reading, taking active steps to improve your skills is the way to go.

Learn a process

Problem solving can be complicated, particularly when attempting to solve large problems for the first time. Using a problem solving process helps give structure to your problem solving efforts and focus on creating outcomes, rather than worrying about the format.

Tools such as the seven-step problem solving process above are effective because not only do they feature steps that will help a team solve problems, they also develop skills along the way. Each step asks for people to engage with the process using different skills and in doing so, helps the team learn and grow together. Group processes of varying complexity and purpose can also be found in the SessionLab library of facilitation techniques . Using a tried and tested process and really help ease the learning curve for both those leading such a process, as well as those undergoing the purpose.

Effective teams make decisions about where they should and shouldn’t expend additional effort. By using a problem solving process, you can focus on the things that matter, rather than stumbling towards a solution haphazardly.

Create a feedback loop

Some skills gaps are more obvious than others. It’s possible that your perception of your active listening skills differs from those of your colleagues.

It’s valuable to create a system where team members can provide feedback in an ordered and friendly manner so they can all learn from one another. Only by identifying areas of improvement can you then work to improve them.

Remember that feedback systems require oversight and consideration so that they don’t turn into a place to complain about colleagues. Design the system intelligently so that you encourage the creation of learning opportunities, rather than encouraging people to list their pet peeves.

While practice might not make perfect, it does make the problem solving process easier. If you are having trouble with critical thinking, don’t shy away from doing it. Get involved where you can and stretch those muscles as regularly as possible.

Problem solving skills come more naturally to some than to others and that’s okay. Take opportunities to get involved and see where you can practice your skills in situations outside of a workshop context. Try collaborating in other circumstances at work or conduct data analysis on your own projects. You can often develop those skills you need for problem solving simply by doing them. Get involved!

Use expert exercises and methods

Learn from the best. Our library of 700+ facilitation techniques is full of activities and methods that help develop the skills you need to be an effective problem solver. Check out our templates to see how to approach problem solving and other organizational challenges in a structured and intelligent manner.

There is no single approach to improving problem solving skills, but by using the techniques employed by others you can learn from their example and develop processes that have seen proven results.

Try new ways of thinking and change your mindset

Using tried and tested exercises that you know well can help deliver results, but you do run the risk of missing out on the learning opportunities offered by new approaches. As with the problem solving process, changing your mindset can remove blockages and be used to develop your problem solving skills.

Most teams have members with mixed skill sets and specialties. Mix people from different teams and share skills and different points of view. Teach your customer support team how to use design thinking methods or help your developers with conflict resolution techniques. Try switching perspectives with facilitation techniques like Flip It! or by using new problem solving methodologies or models. Give design thinking, liberating structures or lego serious play a try if you want to try a new approach. You will find that framing problems in new ways and using existing skills in new contexts can be hugely useful for personal development and improving your skillset. It’s also a lot of fun to try new things. Give it a go!

Encountering business challenges and needing to find appropriate solutions is not unique to your organization. Lots of very smart people have developed methods, theories and approaches to help develop problem solving skills and create effective solutions. Learn from them!

Books like The Art of Thinking Clearly , Think Smarter, or Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow are great places to start, though it’s also worth looking at blogs related to organizations facing similar problems to yours, or browsing for success stories. Seeing how Dropbox massively increased growth and working backward can help you see the skills or approach you might be lacking to solve that same problem. Learning from others by reading their stories or approaches can be time-consuming but ultimately rewarding.

A tired, distracted mind is not in the best position to learn new skills. It can be tempted to burn the candle at both ends and develop problem solving skills outside of work. Absolutely use your time effectively and take opportunities for self-improvement, though remember that rest is hugely important and that without letting your brain rest, you cannot be at your most effective.

Creating distance between yourself and the problem you might be facing can also be useful. By letting an idea sit, you can find that a better one presents itself or you can develop it further. Take regular breaks when working and create a space for downtime. Remember that working smarter is preferable to working harder and that self-care is important for any effective learning or improvement process.

Want to design better group processes?

Over to you

Now we’ve explored some of the key problem solving skills and the problem solving steps necessary for an effective process, you’re ready to begin developing more effective solutions and leading problem solving workshops.

Need more inspiration? Check out our post on problem solving activities you can use when guiding a group towards a great solution in your next workshop or meeting. Have questions? Did you have a great problem solving technique you use with your team? Get in touch in the comments below. We’d love to chat!

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Criminal Justice

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False confessions.

A false confession is a narrative admission to a crime that is made, orally or in writing, by an innocent person. Research shows that innocent people may confess in different ways and for different reasons—resulting in three types of false confessions: voluntary, compliant, and internalized. From an empirical perspective, this entry addresses the evolution of our understanding of false confessions, the frequency of their occurrence, and the methods of interrogation that put innocent people at risk.

False confessions are an important problem in forensic psychology, especially when viewed in the context of their consequences within the criminal justice system. Historically, confession evidence is considered the most incriminating form of evidence that can be presented at trial, a belief that is supported by its effects on jury decision making. Even when disputed, uncorroborated, and contradicted by other evidence, confessions are a driving force for conviction.

Among the many notable examples of this phenomenon was the infamous 1989 Central Park Jogger case, in which five teenage boys confessed to brutally beating and raping a female jogger in New York’s Central Park. Even though the boys were subjected to lengthy and harsh interrogations, gave confessions that were filled with factual errors, retracted their confessions shortly thereafter, and were excluded as donors of the semen by DNA tests, each was convicted at trial— solely on the basis that they had confessed. It was not until 13 years later that they were exonerated when a serial rapist stepped forward from prison to confess. His confession betrayed firsthand knowledge of the crime and was supported by a match to the original DNA sample.

Questions of Prevalence of False Confessions

The jogger case is notorious but not unique. Beginning with the Salem witch trials of 1692, numerous false confessions surfaced when it was later discovered that the confessed crime had not been committed (e.g., the alleged victim turned up alive) or that it was physically impossible (e.g., the confessor was demonstrably elsewhere) or when the real perpetrator was apprehended (e.g., by ballistics evidence). Indeed, as more and more wrongful convictions are discovered, often as a result of newly available DNA tests on old evidence, it is apparent that 15% to 25% of those wrongfully convicted had confessed. Moreover, many false confessions are discovered before there is a trial, are not reported by the police, are not publicized by the media, or result in plea bargains and are never contested—suggesting that the known cases represent the tip of an iceberg. In short, although it is not possible to know the prevalence rate of false confessions, it is clear that they occur with some regularity, making it important to understand how they come about and how they can be prevented.

Types of False Confessions

Both criminals and innocent suspects may confess, providing true and false confessions, respectively. Based on a taxonomy introduced by Saul Kassin and Lawrence Wrightsman, it is now common to further divide the latter into three types: voluntary, compliant, and internalized.

Voluntary False Confessions

In the absence of pressure from the police, voluntary false confessions occur when people freely admit to crimes for which they were not responsible. Sometimes innocent people have volunteered confessions in this way to protect the actual perpetrator, often a parent or a child. At other times, however, voluntary false confessions have resulted from a pathological desire for attention, especially in high-profile cases reported in the news media; a conscious or unconscious need for self-punishment to alleviate feelings of guilt over other transgressions; or an inability to distinguish fact from fantasy, a common feature of certain psychological disorders. As revealed in actual known cases, the motives underlying voluntary false confessions are as diverse as the people who make them.

A number of high-profile cases illustrate the point. In 1932, the aviator Charles Lindbergh’s baby was kidnapped, prompting some 200 people to volunteer confessions. In 1947, Elizabeth Short, a young, aspiring actress, later called “Black Dahlia” for her black hair and attire, was brutally murdered in Los Angeles and her nude body cut in half, prompting more than 60 people, mostly men, to confess. In the 1980s, Henry Lee Lucas falsely confessed to hundreds of unsolved murders, mostly in Texas, making him the most prolific serial confessor in history. More recently, John Mark Karr was arrested in Thailand in the summer of 2006, after it appeared that he had voluntarily confessed to the unsolved 1996 murder of Jon Benet Ramsey, a 6-year-old beauty pageant contestant in Boulder, Colorado. Karr was intimately familiar with the facts of the crime. Ultimately, he was not charged, however, after his ex-wife placed him in a different state and after DNA tests from the crime scene implicated another, still unidentified, man.

Compliant False Confessions

In contrast to cases in which innocent people confess without external pressure are the numerous false confessions that are elicited through pressure from family, friends, and most notably, the processes of police interrogation.

In many of these cases, the suspect surrenders to the demand for a confession to escape from the stress and discomfort of the situation, avoid a threat of harm or punishment, or gain a promised or implied reward. This type of confession is a mere act of public compliance by a suspect who comes to believe that the short-term benefits of confession relative to denial outweigh the long-term costs. American history contains numerous stories of this type of confession— as in the Salem witch trials of 1692, when some 50 women were tortured and threatened into confessing to witchcraft. This type of false confession is also illustrated in the Central Park jogger case, in which all the boys retracted their confessions immediately on arrest and said that they had confessed because they were scared and had expected to be allowed to go home. In the interrogation room, there are many specific incentives for this type of compliance—such as being allowed to sleep, eat, make a phone call, go home, or feed a drug habit. The desire to terminate the questioning may be particularly pressing for people who are young, desperate, socially dependent, or anxious about additional confinement. As discussed later in this entry, certain commonly used interrogation techniques increase the risk of police-induced compliant false confessions.

Internalized False Confessions

In some cases, innocent but vulnerable people, as a result of exposure to highly suggestive and misleading interrogation tactics, not only comply with the demand for a confession but come to internalize a belief in their guilt. In extreme cases, these beliefs are accompanied by detailed false memories of what they allegedly did, how, and why.

The case of 18-year-old Peter Reilly illustrates this phenomenon. Reilly called the police when he found his mother dead in their home. The police administered a lie-detector test and told Reilly that he had failed it, which was not true but which indicated that he was guilty despite his lack of a conscious recollection. After hours of interrogation, Reilly transformed from certain denial to confusion, self-doubt, a change in belief (“Well, it really looks like I did it”), and eventually a full confession (“I remember slashing once at my mother’s throat with a straight razor I used for model airplanes”). Two years later, independent evidence revealed that Reilly was innocent. The case of 14-year-old Michael Crowe, charged with stabbing his sister, similarly illustrates the process. At first, Michael denied the charge. Soon, however, he conceded, “I’m not sure how I did it. All I know is I did it”—an admission that was followed by lies about the physical evidence. Eventually, the boy concluded that he had a split personality—that “bad Michael” killed his sister, while “good Michael” blocked out the incident. The charge was later dropped when a local vagrant with a history of violence was found with the girl’s blood on his clothing.

Why Innocents Confess?

The reasons why people confess to crimes they did not commit are numerous and multifaceted. Sometimes, an individual may be dispositionally naive, compliant, suggestible, delusional, anxious, or otherwise impaired so that little interrogative pressure is required to produce a false confession. In these cases, clinical testing and assessment may be useful in determining whether an individual suspect is prone or vulnerable to confession. At other times, however, normal adults, not overly naive or impaired, confess to crimes they did not commit as a way of coping with the pressures of police interrogation. Indeed, social psychology research has amply shown that human beings are profoundly influenced by figures of authority and can be induced to behave in ways that are detrimental to themselves and others. In short, both personal and situational risk factors may increase the risk of a false confession.

Dispositional Risk Factors

Over the years, numerous studies by Gisli Gudjonsson and his colleagues have shown that not everyone is equally vulnerable to becoming a false confessor. For example, they note that suspects vary in their predispositions toward compliance (as measured by the Gudjonsson Compliance Scale) and suggestibility (as measured by the Gudjonsson Suggestibility Scale). People high in compliance desire to please others and avoid confrontation—which increases the tendency to capitulate in a highly adversarial interrogation. Those who are high in suggestibility are often less assertive, have lower self-esteem, and display poorer memories. In studies of crime suspects, those who confessed and later retracted their statements obtained higher suggestibility scores than the general population, whereas resistors, who maintained their innocence throughout the interrogation, obtained lower scores.

Also at risk are innocent juvenile suspects, who are overrepresented in the population of known false confessors. Juveniles are more likely to comply with authority figures and to believe false presentations of evidence. Research shows that they also exhibit less comprehension than adults of their Miranda rights, are less likely to invoke these rights, and are more likely to confess when under pressure to do so.

Mental retardation is also a substantial risk factor, as it is associated with increases in compliance and suggestibility. Research has shown that people with intellectual impairments do not comprehend their Miranda rights and are prone to answer “Yes” to a range of questions, particularly from those in positions of authority, indicating an acquiescence response bias. They are also highly influenced by misinformation, a suggestibility effect that increases the risk of internalized false confessions.

Mental illness can also increase the tendency for false confessions. Distorted perceptions and memories, a breakdown in reality monitoring, anxiety, mood disturbance, and lack of self-control are common symptoms of many categories of mental illness. These symptoms may lead people to offer misleading information, including false confessions, to the police during interviews and interrogations. Moreover, disorders that lead people to be more anxious can increase the likelihood of their making a false confession as a means of escape from interrogation.

Interrogation Risk Factors

Although there are subtle variations among approaches, the typical police interrogation is a multi-step event that involves an interplay of three processes: (1) isolation, (2) confrontation, and (3) minimization.

First, interrogators are trained to remove suspects from their familiar surroundings and question them in the police station, often in a specially constructed interrogation room. To some extent, interrogation time is a risk factor. Although most police interrogations last for less than 2 hours, a study of documented false confession cases in which time was recorded revealed that the mean of interrogation exceeded 16 hours.

Second, interrogators confront suspects with strong assertions of guilt that are designed to communicate that resistance is futile. As part of this process, interrogators are trained to block the suspect from issuing denials, to refute alibis, and even to present supposedly incontrovertible evidence of the suspect’s guilt— even if such evidence does not exist. Historically, the polygraph has played a key role in this false evidence ploy. In numerous false confession cases, compliant and internalized false confessions have been extracted by police examiners who told suspects that they had failed a lie detector test—even when they had not (as in the Peter Reilly and Michael Crowe cases described earlier).

The third step is to minimize the crime by providing suspects, who are feeling trapped by confrontation, with moral justification or face-saving excuses, making confession seem like a cost-effective means of escape. At this stage, interrogators are trained to suggest to suspects that their alleged actions were spontaneous, accidental, provoked, peer pressured, drug induced, or otherwise justifiable by external factors, as a way to encourage confession. Indeed, research shows that minimization tactics lead people to infer that leniency will follow from confession, even in the absence of an explicit promise.

Empirical Research on False Confessions

In recent years, researchers have sought to examine various aspects of false confessions using an array of methods—including aggregated case studies, naturalistic observations of live and videotaped interrogations, self-reports from the police and suspects, and laboratory and field experiments designed for hypothesis-testing purposes.

Saul Kassin and Katherine Kiechel developed the first laboratory paradigm to systematically examine the factors that elicit false confessions. In this experiment, participants working on a computer were accused of hitting the ALT key they had been instructed to avoid. In the original study, participants were rendered more or less vulnerable to manipulation by being paced to work at a fast or slow pace. In a manipulation of the false evidence ploy, some participants, but not others, were then exposed to a confederate who claimed to have seen them hit the forbidden key. Results showed that this false evidence ploy significantly increased the false confession rate, as well as the tendency of participants to internalize the belief in their own guilt—particularly among participants rendered vulnerable to manipulation. Follow-up studies using this computer-crash paradigm have replicated and extended this false evidence effect.

A second laboratory paradigm was developed by Melissa Russano and colleagues to investigate the effects of promises and minimization on both true and false confession rates. In their study, participants were paired with a confederate for a problem-solving study and instructed to work alone on some trials and jointly on others. In a guilty condition, the confederate asked the participant for help on an individual problem, inducing a violation of the experimental rule; in an innocent condition, the confederate did not make this request. Later, all participants were accused of cheating and were interrogated by an experimenter who promised leniency, made minimizing remarks, used both tactics, or used no tactics. The results showed that minimization was as persuasive as an explicit promise, increasing the rate not only of true confessions but of false confessions as well.

In light of the numerous wrongful convictions involving false confessions, as well as recent research, the time is ripe for law enforcement professionals, attorneys, judges, social scientists, and policymakers to evaluate current practices and seek the kinds of reforms that would not only secure confessions from criminals but also protect the innocent in the process.

References:

Drizin, S. A., & Leo, R. A. (2004). The problem of false confessions in the post-DNA world. North Carolina Law Review, 82, 891-1007.
Gudjonsson, G. H. (2003). The psychology of interrogations and confessions: A handbook. West Sussex, UK: Wiley. Kassin, S. M. (1997). The psychology of confession evidence. American Psychologist, 52, 221-233.
Kassin, S. M. (2005). On the psychology of confessions: Does innocence put innocents at risk? American Psychologist, 60, 215-228.
Kassin, S. M., & Gudjonsson, G. (2004). The psychology of confessions: A review of the literature and issues. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 5, 33-67.

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Revisiting the False Confession Problem

2018, The journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law

Despite the existence of important safeguards in our criminal legal system, innocent suspects often succumb to forceful and deceptive interrogation techniques. Among those over-represented members of the false confessor population are minors, people with cognitive and intellectual disabilities, and those with psychiatric disorders. Some of the confessions made by these at-risk populations can hardly be considered voluntary or reliable, but they are generally admitted at trial, regardless of their prejudicial effect. Forensic psychiatrists should become more involved in the overall process of evaluating confessions, not only testifying in courts, but also assisting policymakers in reforming the interrogation process and influencing the legal process. Thus, forensic psychiatrists may give their expert opinion by providing proper training to police interrogators and examining videotaped interrogations. In addition, forensic experts can be instrumental in contributing to three legal sol...

Related Papers

Frontiers in Psychiatry

Steffen Lau

Behavioral Sciences & the Law

Melanie Clark Mogavero

Geoffrey Pickersgill

There has been much research in recent years into the causes of the well-known phenomenon that mentally impaired people tend to be over-represented as defendants in the criminal justice process. Less research, however, has been undertaken into why such defendants and suspects appear to be at a higher risk of making false confessions. This may be because it appears that there is a simple answer to this question: such suspects are mentally impaired and vulnerable to the pressures of the criminal justice system, particularly those involved in being interviewed by the police. This is certainly one valid reason but it is by no means the only reason. Research suggests several causal factors are involved. This paper examines some of these causal factors and in doing so reveals the incremental nature of knowledge construction which various researchers have taken in their studies. Dispositional factors and situational factors are both instrumental in causing false confessions. The paper conc...

The Bulletin of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law

Michael Perlin

Michael D. Cicchini , Lawrence T White

Modern interrogation techniques are designed to extract confessions from guilty suspects, but they sometimes induce false confessions from innocent suspects. Often, the only meaningful protection a defendant has against a false confession is to challenge its reliability at jury trial. In so doing, defendants may attempt to offer expert testimony on false confessions. This typically includes testimony about specific interrogation techniques and their correlation to false confessions, as well as the personality traits that make a person most susceptible to falsely confessing. Courts, however, often exclude such expert testimony, holding that the subject matter is already within the jurors’ common knowledge, and therefore the testimony would not assist the jury in determining the reliability of the confession. The purpose of this Article, then, is to determine what is actually within, and what is outside of, the common knowledge of jury-eligible citizens. The evidence presented in this Article shows that the body of knowledge on false confessions is, in fact, outside of the common knowledge, and further, that most individuals hold misconceptions that are potentially harmful to innocent defendants. Consequently, in light of this evidence, courts should admit expert testimony on false confessions. Such testimony would greatly assist the jury in evaluating the reliability of the alleged confession and deciding the guilt or innocence of the defendant.

The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology (1973-)

Richard Ofshe

McKenna Vanhorn

A bulk of psychological research has been done on the opinions of mock juries and potential jurors involving police interrogations and coerced confessions. Experts of false confessions study such areas that include the different coercive techniques employed by law enforcement and then present these findings in research. Experts study personal confession risk factors, including mental illness, attempts at protecting others, and more, to find out how false confessions happen and why. However, would case specific expert testimony, explaining conditions for false confessions presented at trial, make a difference in the conviction of a defendant? Despite predictions to the contrary, this study has shown no significance between expert testimony and verdict outcomes. There was also no connection between respondents’ religious or political affiliation and their choice of verdict. Interestingly, there is a significant correlation between participants’ confidence in police interrogation techniques and misconceptions surrounding false confessions, including their cause and consequence.

Deborah Davis

The vast majority of false confessions occur in the context of interrogation, and in response to the sources of distress and persuasive tactics of the interrogation. However, there are widely held mistaken assumptions that a false confessor must suffer some personal defect such as a mental disorder. In this article, we explain that many normal people may give false confessions under certain social situations. We examine such situations and their effects on false confessions. We urge courts to recognize that suspect-enhanced vulnerabilities are not a necessary condition for the elicitation of false confessions, but rather that much lesser situational factors have just as much influence on the interrogated. We lay out a set of guidelines to assist expert testifiers in evaluating better an interrogation-induced confession.

The journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law

Claire Pouncey

The confession of a criminal defendant serves as a prosecutor's most compelling piece of evidence during trial. Courts must preserve a defendant's constitutional right to a fair trial while upholding the judicial interests of presenting competent and reliable evidence to the jury. When a defendant seeks to challenge the validity of that confession through expert testimony, the prosecution often contests the admissibility of the expert's opinion. Depending on the content and methodology of the expert's opinion, testimony addressing the phenomenon of false confessions may or may not be admissible. This article outlines the scientific and epistemological bases of expert testimony on false confession, notes the obstacles facing its admissibility, and provides guidance to the expert in formulating opinions that will reach the judge or jury. We review the 2006 New Jersey Superior Court decision in State of New Jersey v. George King to illustrate what is involved in the adm...

Revista Bioética

Lisieux Telles

Knowing the ethical paradigm that bases the medicine moral code is fundamental to act not only in care but also in the expert testimony process. From a revision of the literature, we propose to evaluate the way the four fundamental ethical principles (beneficence, nonmaleficence, autonomy, and justice) apply before, during, and after the psychiatric expert testimony, be it as expert or as technical assistant. New ethical challenges have been appearing in forensic psychiatry. With the COVID-19 pandemic, technology was adopted to allow the practice of telemedicine, but debates still occur if that would suffice for an adequate psychiatric expert testimony evaluation. Considering the complexity of the area, each situation must be analyzed in an individualized and all-encompassing way and seeking help to debate the ethical and legal perspectives of psychiatric expert testimonies is recommended when necessary.

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“I Did It, But Not Like That”: Effects of Factually Incorrect Confessions on Juror Judgments

Eric e. jones.

a Psychology Department, Grand Valley State University, Allendale, MI, USA;

Abby D. Bandy

b School of Law, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL, USA

Phillip G. Palmer Jr.

Several high-profile cases involving wrongful convictions have featured factually incorrect confessions (i.e., confessions that contradicted case facts). The current research investigated the effects of factually incorrect confessions on juror judgments. In Experiment 1, participants read a trial transcript, containing either no confession, a factually correct confession, or a factually incorrect confession after a 1-hour or 10-hour interrogation. Afterwards, participants judged the coerciveness of the confession, guilt of the suspect and named accomplice, and strength of the prosecution’s case. Experiment 2 used confessions with different factual errors and different interrogation lengths. Participants made the same legal judgments. In both experiments, participants rated a factually incorrect confession as more coerced than a factually correct confession. Participants fully discounted factually incorrect confessions when evaluating a defendant’s guilt. However, compared to conditions with no confession, participants perceived a named accomplice as guiltier and the prosecution’s case as stronger when the defendant provided a factually incorrect confession.

In the Central Park Five case, four teenagers confessed to raping Patricia Meili, and these confessions implicated a fifth teenager. Subsequently, a jury convicted all five teenagers. However, several details of these confessions contradicted case facts. For example, in his confession, Kevin Richardson failed to describe the victim’s clothes accurately and mistakenly said the victim had not been tied up (Burns, 2011 ). In a documentary about the Central Park Five, one juror recalled bringing up the inconsistencies between the boys’ confessions during deliberation, but the other jurors found the boys’ confessions too persuasive (Burns & Burns, 2013 ). More than 10 years after the teenagers’ convictions, Matias Reyes confessed to raping Patricia by himself. DNA evidence confirmed his admission. Even so, some questioned his account. Though Matias claimed to be the lone perpetrator, doctors did not believe that Patricia’s injuries were consistent with Matias’s account or with his claim that he acted alone (Gardiner, 2014 ). Based on the confession by Matias, the convictions of the teenagers were eventually overturned.

Although research has examined how jurors respond to testimony from inconsistent witnesses, little research has investigated how jurors respond to confessions that are inconsistent with other case facts (Palmer, Button, Barnett, & Brewer, 2016 ). The purpose of the current research was to examine the impact of factually incorrect confessions on juror judgments. Would highlighting the inconsistencies between the teenagers’ confessions and the case facts have changed the jury’s decision?

In approximately 25% of documented wrongful convictions, the defendant falsely confessed to committing the crime or provided other self-incriminating remarks ( http://innocenceproject.org/ ). Therefore, recommendations have been made to videotape or document interrogations and confessions, so that jurors can determine whether or not a confession is real (e.g., Kassin & Gudjonsson, 2004 ). When making decisions about cases with confessions, jurors may be faced with a situation where the confession matches the case facts (factually correct confession) or conflicts with them (factually incorrect confession). When a confession conflicts with case facts, at least three outcomes are possible. First, the inconsistencies may signal that the confessor is lying to cover his or her guilt, or the guilt of someone else. In fact, in the West Memphis Three case, Inspector Gary Gitchell explained away a factually incorrect confession by suggesting that Jessie Misskelley (one of the defendants) gave incorrect information to minimize his involvement (Leveritt, 2002 ). Consequently, a factually incorrect confession might enhance the perceived realness of a confession. When jurors are presented with an interrogation and confession, they are essentially asked to determine whether the confessor is lying or telling the truth. One common strategy that people use to detect lies is to look for inconsistencies in a story (DePaulo et al., 2003 ; Mann, Vrij, & Bull, 2004 ). As an alternative to concealing one’s own involvement, factually incorrect statements could signal a cover-up for someone else. Indeed, adolescent offenders who falsely confessed often reported doing so to cover for a friend (Malloy, Shulman, & Cauffman, 2014 ).

Second, research on eyewitness memory shows the limits of people’s memories (Frenda, Nichols, & Loftus, 2011 ). Therefore, factual errors might be dismissed by legal practitioners and jurors. They may instead focus on the admission of guilt. Inspector Gary Gitchell made this argument as well by suggesting that Jessie Misskelley provided a factually incorrect confession because he was confused (Leveritt, 2002 ). When factual errors are present in a confession, “the naïve spectator will see the confessional glasses as half full, not half empty. In light of all that is known about the problems with eyewitness memory, it is not reasonable to expect perfection in the accounts of crime suspects” (Kassin, 2004 , p. 188). Moreover, it is difficult for most people to understand how an innocent person could confess to a crime (Burns & Burns, 2013 ; Kassin, 2012 ; Leo, 2009 ), so an admission may be especially powerful, whether errors are present or not.

Third, the factual errors may reflect a false or coerced confession. Consequently, there are also reasons to believe that jurors would discount the confession. In the Central Park Five case, the boys endured separate interrogations for between 14 and 30 hours, leading the suspects to fabricate stories in order to escape the interrogation (Burns & Burns, 2013 ). Jurors might view factually incorrect confessions as coerced and resembling inconsistent eyewitness testimony, which jurors typically discount (Berman & Cutler, 1996 ; Jones, Williams, & Brewer, 2008 ; Pozzulo & O’Neill, 2012 ).

Confession Evidence and Juror Judgments

In general, laypeople and police officers are not good at recognizing false confessions (Kassin, Meissner, & Norwick, 2005 ). Nevertheless, jurors express more concern about confessions made after threats than those made after promises of leniency (Kassin & Wrightsman, 1980 , 1981 ) or minimization tactics (Kassin & McNall, 1991 ). Regardless of whether jurors’ judgments are right or wrong, one might expect that jurors would make different legal judgments, depending on whether they believed that a confession was real or coerced. Unfortunately, this does not appear to be true. For instance, Kassin and Sukel ( 1997 ) found that participants rated a confession as more coerced when provided under high rather than low pressure. Even though participants reported that the confession made under high pressure did not influence their judgments, participants perceived the defendant’s guilt similarly in both situations. Likewise, participants found the use of threats, promises, and minimization tactics equally coercive, but only fully discounted the confession resulting from threats (Kassin & McNall, 1991 ). Also demonstrating the powerful influence of confession evidence, recent research showed that participants were more likely to discount the recanted testimony of a witness than a recanted confession, even though these recantations represented similar situations (Bernhard & Miller, 2018 ). Moreover, confession evidence may initially anchor jurors’ judgments towards guilty and jurors may not appropriately adjust their judgments after learning about the flaws of the confession (c.f. Wilson, Houston, Etling, & Brekke, 1996 ). Archival analyses of cases with false confessions have shown a strong tendency of juries to convict (Drizin & Leo, 2004 ). Consequently, the current research examined the influence of confession evidence on several legal judgments. A control condition with no confession allowed us to investigate whether factually incorrect confessions had any influence on jurors’ judgments.

Despite the findings above, some recent research indicates that participants are sensitive to risk factors of false confessions, especially when they receive instructions about coercive interrogation techniques (Jones & Penrod, 2018 ). Likewise, Woestehoff and Meissner ( 2016 ) believed that they must highlight alternative motivations for a confession (e.g., by providing expert testimony) in order to sensitize their participants to the possibility that the defendant confessed falsely. Instead, they found that participants discounted confessions provided under pressure (with or without expert testimony) and were more likely to assign situational attributions for these confessions. Similarly, using short case summaries, Palmer et al. ( 2016 ) expected that participants would only discount factually incorrect confessions when explanations other than guilt were made salient. However, they found that participants discounted factually incorrect confessions by generating their own plausible alternative explanations, leading to fewer guilty verdicts against a defendant. Using trial transcripts rather than short case summaries, we wished to further investigate participants’ sensitivity to factually incorrect confessions by also examining additional judgments about a case, besides the defendant’s culpability.

Interrogation Length and Confession Evidence

As summarized above, past research has provided mixed messages about whether mock jurors discount confessions obtained under pressure. It has also provided mixed messages about whether plausible alternative explanations must be highlighted in order for participants to fully discount coerced confessions. In research specifically investigating factually incorrect confessions, Palmer et al. ( 2016 ) found that an interrogation’s level of coercion (which included information about interrogation length) did not interact with the confession’s correctness on judgments of the defendant’s guilt. Participants discounted factually incorrect confessions, regardless of coercion level. Even so, we believed it was important to include a manipulation of interrogation length for replication purposes and to further test participants’ sensitivity to factually incorrect confessions using outcomes other than the defendant’s guilt.

Researchers believe that long interrogations decrease the diagnosticity of confessions (Kassin & Gudjonsson, 2004 ). Thus, it is important to understand how this information affects jurors’ judgments. In one analysis of cases, coerced confessions occurred after interrogations averaging more than 16 hours (Drizin & Leo, 2004 ). In contrast, under typical circumstances, interrogations usually last less than 2 hours (Drizin & Leo, 2004 ; Wald, Ayres, Hess, Schantz, & Whitebread, 1967 ). Given people’s tendency to explain behavior with dispositional rather than situational causes (Ross, 1977 ), information about the interrogation length might highlight the situational influences. Specifically, jurors might be more likely to attribute a confession to situational causes (e.g., coercion) after a longer interrogation and to a dispositional cause after a shorter interrogation. Indeed, Woestehoff and Meissner ( 2016 ) found that their participants discounted confession evidence when they perceived a situational cause for the confession.

Moreover, recent research has investigated theoretical reasons for why long interrogations may increase the risk of false confessions. Drawing from self-regulation research, Davis and Leo ( 2012 ) suggested that long interrogations might reduce a suspect’s motivation and ability to resist the influence of interrogators (“interrogation-related regulatory decline”). Because of sleep deprivation, fatigue, and other factors, suspects may gradually experience reductions in the cognitive resources needed to think clearly and logically about the situation, leading them to falsely confess. Furthermore, participants in mock-interrogation situations gave more weight to immediate (e.g., escaping the situation) rather than distal consequences (e.g., legal action) when deciding to confess (Madon, Guyll, Scherr, Greathouse, & Wells, 2012 ), especially during lengthy interviews (Madon, Yang, Smalarz, Guyll, & Scherr, 2013 ). Thus, suspects might be more likely to confess falsely during longer interrogations. To the extent that jurors have an intuitive understanding of these processes, information about the interrogation length may influence their legal judgments.

Given the literature reviewed above, we made several predictions. For perceived coercion of a confession, we made competing hypotheses to correspond to the different explanations outlined earlier regarding how jurors might view confessions that contradict case facts.

Hypothesis 1a : Compared to a factually correct confession, a factually incorrect confession will be perceived as less coerced. Hypothesis 1b : Compared to a factually correct confession, a factually incorrect confession will be perceived as more coerced.

Data supporting Hypothesis 1a might suggest that participants viewed confessors who gave accounts conflicting with case facts as deceitful and guilty. In contrast, support for Hypothesis 1b might imply that participants believed confessors had been coaxed into giving a confession. No significant difference between the types of confessions would support the view that the errors resulted from normal limitations of human memory and should not raise concerns. Regardless of the above outcome, we believed that interrogation time would interact with confession correctness by highlighting the coercive situation. This expectation was consistent with previous research demonstrating the role of experimenter-provided (Jones & Penrod, 2018 ) and self-generated (Palmer et al., 2016 ) plausible alternative explanations for confessions.

Hypothesis 2 : As interrogation length increases, a factually incorrect confession will appear even more coerced than a factually correct confession.

A confession perceived as real would likely lead participants to view the defendant as guilty. However, previous research has shown that even confessions perceived as coerced can affect participants’ judgments. Moreover, research documenting that suspects may falsely confess to protect a friend (Malloy et al., 2014 ) provides an additional reason why participants may not fully discount a confession with incorrect details. Participants may believe the confession still contains a kernel of truth, perhaps about the actions of a friend. Indeed, many high-profile cases (e.g., the Central Park Five, West Memphis Three, Amanda Knox) show that confessors not only implicate themselves but others as well. Despite recent research demonstrating participants’ sensitivity to factually incorrect confessions and risk factors for false confessions, much more published research has shown that jurors perceive confession evidence as bolstering the prosecution’s case for the defendant’s guilt, even confessions produced under coercive conditions. Consequently, we made the following predictions:

Hypothesis 3 : Participants will perceive a defendant who gives a factually incorrect confession as more guilty than a defendant who gives no confession. Hypothesis 4 : Participants will perceive an alleged accomplice named in a defendant’s factually incorrect confession as more guilty than when a defendant gives no confession. Hypothesis 5 : Participants will perceive the prosecution’s case as stronger when the defendant gives a factually incorrect confession than no confession.

Experiment 1

Participants and design.

In partial fulfillment of a course requirement for their introductory psychology course, 177 undergraduates from a Midwestern United States university participated in this experiment. The experimenter randomly assigned each participant to one condition of a 3 (confession correctness: no confession vs. factually correct confession vs. factually incorrect confession) × 2 (interrogation length: 1 hour vs. 10 hours) randomized groups factorial design.

Procedure and materials

Up to five participants could attend each experiment session. Participants completed the study individually at a computer, which was situated inside a cubicle. Prior to the session, each computer had been randomly assigned to one of six conditions. After providing consent, participants received instructions to read a trial transcript about the murder of a young woman and then formulate judgments about it. The transcript began with the judge’s initial instructions and the lawyers’ opening statements. Next, participants read Officer Erikson’s testimony, which included questioning from the prosecutor and defense attorney. Finally, the transcript concluded with the lawyers’ closing statements and final judge’s instructions. After reading the transcript, participants provided judgments about the case.

Participants read one of six trial transcripts. The details of the case and confession were inspired by actual cases of wrongful conviction and trials where a written confession was introduced as evidence. Each transcript involved the defendant (Emily) being on trial for the murder of her roommate (Anna). The prosecutor argued that Emily and her boyfriend (Jared) attacked Anna when she confronted them about doing chores. Officer Erikson, the lead detective on the case, testified about his interrogation of Emily. Depending on the condition, the interrogation resulted either in no confession or in a confession. If Emily confessed, the defense attorney argued that Emily was coerced into a confession. If Emily did not confess, the defense attorney claimed that Emily had been falsely accused. The transcripts ranged in length from approximately 1,800 words (no-confession conditions) to 2,800 words (factually incorrect confession conditions).

Manipulation of confession correctness

Officer Erikson described his interrogation of Emily during his testimony. The interrogation resulted either in no confession or in a confession, which was either consistent or inconsistent with case facts. In the factually correct confession condition, no inconsistencies in the confession were apparent when the defense attorney cross-examined Officer Erikson. However, as in all conditions with a confession, the defense attorney argued that Emily provided a coerced confession, suggesting that the interrogation environment was unreasonable (e.g., lengthy, occurred in small room with no windows). In the factually incorrect confession condition, several details in Emily’s confession conflicted with case facts, and these inconsistencies were revealed when the defense attorney cross-examined Officer Erikson. First, Emily reported that it was sunny and 80 degrees on the day of the murder, so she and Jared skipped their classes to play golf. During cross-examination of Officer Erikson, the defense attorney revealed that it was actually cloudy, rainy, and 60 degrees. Also, school records showed that Emily attended all of her classes. Second, Emily confessed to killing Anna with a golf club. However, the autopsy suggested that Anna had died from suffocation.

Manipulation of interrogation time

When questioned about how long the interrogation lasted, Officer Erikson either responded with 1 hour or 10 hours. The defense attorney later repeated the time, and Officer Erikson confirmed it.

Manipulation checks and dependent measures

Three questions assessed the effectiveness of the manipulations. Participants responded (yes/no) to whether or not Emily had confessed and to whether she provided information that conflicted with other case facts (yes/no). Participants also recalled the interrogation length (1 hour or 10 hours).

Perceived coercion of confession

Using 7-point scales (1 = not at all, 7 = very much), four questions (α=.78) gauged participants’ perceptions that Emily’s confession was coerced (e.g., “To what extent do you think that Emily's confession was coerced?”). Only participants in the conditions where Emily confessed answered these questions.

Emily’s culpability

Participants communicated their belief in the probability of Emily’s guilt by selecting a number from 0 to 100, where 0 indicated “0 percent likelihood that Emily is guilty” and 100 represented “100 percent likelihood that Emily is guilty.” Participants also reached a dichotomous verdict about Emily (guilty or not guilty).

Jared’s probability of guilt

Using a 0–100 scale, participants rated the probability of guilt for Jared, whom Emily had implicated in her confession.

Strength of prosecution’s case

Four questions (α= .89) assessed participants’ perceptions of the prosecution’s case against the defendant (e.g., “Based on the information provided, how strong do you think the prosecution's case is against Emily?”). These items used 7-point scales (1 = not at all strong, 7 = extremely strong).

More than 98% of participants recollected the interrogation length accurately. The same percentage remembered correctly whether Emily had confessed during the interrogation. Over 85% of participants remembered correctly whether Emily had provided information during the interrogation that contradicted other case facts. Conclusions did not change by only analyzing the participants who answered all manipulation checks correctly; thus the reported analyses include all participants. For perceived coercion, we used a 2 (interrogation length: 1 hour vs. 10 hours) × 2 (confession correctness: factually correct confession vs. factually incorrect confession) ANOVA to assess the effects of our independent variables. We used chi square analyses to examine results for verdict. For remaining dependent measures, we used 2 (interrogation length) × 3 (confession correctness) ANOVAs. See Table 1 for cell means and standard deviations.

Means and standards deviations of dependent measures (Experiment 1).

Note . N = 118 for coercion and N = 177 for remaining measures. Standard deviations are in parentheses. Cell sizes vary from 29 to 30.

There was a significant main effect for confession correctness, F (1, 114) = 9.63, p < .01, η 2 = .08. Supporting Hypothesis 1b rather than 1a, participants perceived a factually incorrect confession as more coerced than a factually correct confession. The main effect for interrogation length was marginal, F (1, 114) = 3.75, p = .06, η 2 = .03, such that participants perceived any confession as marginally more coerced when it occurred after a 10-hour rather a 1-hour interrogation. The interaction was not significant, F (1, 114) = .51, p = .48, η 2 = .00, thus disconfirming Hypothesis 2.

For participants’ ratings of Emily’s probability of guilt, the main effect for confession correctness reached significance, F (2, 171) = 24.76, p < .001, η 2 = .22. Two planned comparisons revealed that, compared to when she did not confess, participants perceived Emily as more guilty when she gave a factually correct confession, F (1, 171) = 37.60, p < .001, η 2 = .17, but not when she gave a factually incorrect confession, F (1, 171) = .01, p = .94, η 2 = .00. No main effect occurred for interrogation length, F (1, 171) = .45, p = .50, η 2 = .00. However, an interaction qualified the confession correctness main effect, F (2, 171) = 3.40, p < .05, η 2 = .03. When the interrogation lasted 1 hour, participants’ perceptions of Emily’s guilt varied as a function of confession correctness, F (2, 86) = 24.75, p < .001, η 2 = .37. Contrasts showed that participants perceived Emily as guiltier when she gave a factually correct confession than when she made no confession, F (1, 86) = 29.47, p < .001, η 2 = .22, or a factually incorrect confession, F (1, 86) = 43.28, p < .001, η 2 = .32. Perceptions of Emily’s guilt did not differ between the no-confession and factually incorrect confession conditions, F (1, 86) = 1.43, p = .23, η 2 = .01. When the interrogation lasted 10 hours, perceptions of Emily’s guilt also depended on the level of confession correctness, but the differences were smaller, F (2, 85) = 6.06, p < .01, η 2 = .12. Once again, contrasts showed that participants rated Emily as guiltier when she provided a factually correct confession than when she gave no confession, F (1, 85) = 11.67, p = .001, η 2 = .12, or a factually incorrect confession, F (1, 85) = 5.31, p < .05, η 2 = .05. Ratings of Emily’s guilt did not vary between the no-confession and the factually incorrect confession conditions, F (1, 85) = 1.30, p = .26, η 2 = .01. These results failed to support Hypothesis 3, because participants did not rate Emily as guiltier when she provided a factually incorrect confession than if she made no confession.

The results for verdict somewhat differed from the findings for the probability of guilt measure for Emily. For a 1-hour interrogation, the pattern of verdicts differed across the level of confession correctness, χ 2 (2, N = 89) = 44.18, p < .001. Participants delivered more guilty verdicts when Emily provided a factually correct confession than if she gave no confession or a factually incorrect confession, χ 2 (1, N = 60) = 24.31, p < .001 and χ 2 (1, N = 59) = 37.63, p < .001, respectively. Compared to when Emily did not confess, participants provided marginally fewer guilty verdicts when she provided a factually incorrect confession, χ 2 (1, N = 59) = 3.08, p = .08. However, it should be noted that 50% of the cells had expected counts of less than 5 for this last test, so it may be invalid. For a 10-hour interrogation, a different pattern of verdicts emerged across the three levels of confession correctness, χ 2 (2, N = 88) = 12.55, p < .01. Compared to when Emily did not confess, participants voted guilty more often when she provided a factually correct confession, χ 2 (1, N = 58) = 12.62, p < .001. However, participants delivered guilty verdicts equally often whether Emily provided a factually correct or a factually incorrect confession, χ 2 (1, N = 59) = 2.05, p = .15. Interestingly, participants found Emily guilty more often when she provided a factually incorrect confession than when she did not confess at all, χ 2 (1, N = 59) = 5.12, p < .05.

When examining the verdict measure, Hypothesis 3 received mixed support. For a 1-hour interrogation, participants did not deliver more guilty verdicts when Emily provided a factually incorrect confession, than when she did not confess. This finding failed to support Hypothesis 3. However, for the 10-hour interrogation, participants did deliver more guilty verdicts when Emily gave a factually incorrect confession than when she made no confession at all. This result supported Hypothesis 3.

The main effect for confession correctness was significant, F (2, 171) = 9.48, p < .001, η 2 = .10. Two planned comparisons showed that, compared to when Emily did not confess, participants perceived Jared as more guilty when Emily implicated him in a factually correct, F (1, 171) = 18.71, p < .001, η 2 = .10, or a factually incorrect confession, F (1, 171) = 6.74, p = .01, η 2 = .03. The second comparison provided support for Hypothesis 4, which predicted that participants would find Jared guiltier when Emily provided a factually incorrect confession than when she gave no confession. A marginally significant main effect also occurred for interrogation length, F (1, 171) = 3.26, p = .07, η 2 = .02. Participants believed in Jared’s guilt more if Emily confessed after 1 hour than when she did so after 10 hours. The interaction did not reach significance, F (2, 171) = .72, p = .49, η 2 = .01.

The main effect for confession correctness achieved significance, F (2, 171) = 20.84, p < .001, η 2 = .19. Two planned comparisons showed that, compared to when Emily did not confess, participants viewed the prosecution’s case as stronger whether she provided a factually correct, F (1, 171) = 41.19, p < .001, η 2 = .19, or a factually incorrect confession, F (1, 171) = 6.77, p = .01, η 2 = .03. The second comparison supported Hypothesis 5, which predicted that participants would rate the prosecution’s case as stronger when Emily provided a factually incorrect confession than when she made no confession. It should also be noted that a factually correct confession strengthened the prosecution’s case more than did a factually incorrect confession, F (1, 171) = 14.56, p < .001, η 2 = .07. Neither the main effect for interrogation length, F (1, 171) = .58, p = .45, η 2 = .00, nor the interaction reached significance, F (2, 171) = .53, p = .59, η 2 = .00.

On the most important legal decision (i.e., defendant culpability), results provided mixed support for the hypothesis that participants would find the defendant guiltier when she provided a factually incorrect confession compared to when she did not confess. Under the 1-hour interrogation, both the probability of guilt ratings for Emily and the verdict delivered against Emily failed to support this hypothesis. Participants showed little hint of being influenced by the defendant’s condemning words after they learned that the confession contradicted other case facts. However, for a 10-hour interrogation, the results were less clear. Consistent with the aforementioned results, when judging Emily’s probability of guilt, participants did not rate Emily as guiltier when she provided a factually incorrect confession than when she made no confession. For verdict, participants’ judgments diverged from the above-mentioned results. Participants did find Emily guiltier when she provided a factually incorrect confession after 10 hours than when she made no confession. Despite these inconsistencies, overall, the evidence tilted to the side of participants not being influenced by a factually incorrect confession, at least when judging Emily’s guilt.

Even so, other legal judgments appeared to be swayed by the defendant’s factually incorrect confession. Emily’s factually incorrect confession still led participants to perceive Jared as guiltier. Anecdotally, some participants believed that Emily was covering for Jared, a tendency supported by research (Malloy et al., 2014 ). The influence of Emily’s factually incorrect confession was also seen in judgments of the prosecution’s case. Although participants believed that a factually correct confession provided a stronger case than a factually incorrect confession, participants judged a case with a factually incorrect confession as stronger than one with no confession. Moreover, the interrogation length manipulation showed interesting trends in participants’ judgments. Participants perceived a confession resulting from a longer interrogation as marginally more coerced. Interestingly, a factually correct confession that occurred after a longer interrogation led to lower perceptions of Emily’s guilt. To the extent that additional research replicates this finding, law enforcement may benefit from keeping interrogations short. This last result mirrors the findings of Woestehoff and Meissner ( 2016 ), who found that participants viewed a defendant as less guilty under medium- and high-pressure interrogations.

Experiment 2

Experiment 2 tested the same hypotheses, but we made a few changes. First, to increase the generalizability of the findings, we included different errors in Emily’s testimony. Second, in Experiment 1, one of the inconsistencies in Emily’s confession was introduced in a way that essentially gave her an alibi. Recall that Emily claimed she had skipped class to go golfing, but school records showed that she had attended all of her classes. In other words, these school records showed that Emily attended class during the time the police believed the murder occurred. This inconsistency may have provided an especially strong reason for participants to discount Emily’s confession. Therefore, to test further participants’ sensitivity to factually incorrect confessions, we wished to compare participants’ judgments in that condition to one where Emily did not have an alibi. Research is mixed about the influence of alibi evidence on perceptions of a defendant’s guilt. For example, Olson and Wells ( 2004 ) found evidence that alibi information changed perceptions of a suspect’s guilt, with some kinds of alibi evidence providing stronger exculpatory information than others. However, other research has suggested that alibi information does not change a person’s initial judgments (McAllister & Bregman, 1989 ). When decision-makers initially lean towards guilt, they underutilize alibi information that potentially exonerates a suspect. Likewise, decision-makers already leaning towards not guilty tend to underutilize alibi information implying that a suspect could have been at the crime scene. Anecdotally, many wrongful convictions have occurred despite the presence of alibis (Burke & Marion, 2012 ), perhaps because of a preference-consistent interpretation of alibi evidence. Sommers and Douglass ( 2007 ) found that alibi information affected judgments more in the investigative phase than in the trial phase. Presumably, participants in the investigative condition had a more open mind and utilized the alibi information, whereas participants in the trial condition may have assumed that the alibi was weak because the case had made it to trial. Given this mixed research, alibi information may not affect our participants’ judgments. However, we wished to explore participants’ sensitivity to error-filled confessions by including a factually incorrect condition with no alibi information.

In partial fulfillment of a course requirement for their introductory psychology course, 316 undergraduates from a Midwestern United States university participated in this experiment. The experimenter randomly assigned each participant to one condition of a 4 (confession correctness: no confession vs. factually correct confession vs. factually incorrect confession with alibi vs. factually incorrect confession with no alibi) × 2 (interrogation length: 75 min vs. 12 hours) randomized groups factorial design.

The procedure and materials were the same as in Experiment 1, except where noted.

In the factually incorrect condition, Emily’s confession contradicted case facts that differed from Experiment 1. There were two versions of the factually incorrect confession: the differences are explained below. In her confession, Emily claimed that she set up a tee time to go golfing with Jared on the day of the murder. However, during cross-examination, the defense attorney revealed that the golf course had no record of a tee time for Emily and Jared. When asked to address this discrepancy, Officer Erikson dismissed this concern by suggesting that Emily may have been thinking about a different golf outing. Moreover, Emily confessed to hitting Anna on the left side of the head with a golf club. When asked by the defense attorney, Officer Erikson admitted that Anna had been hit on the right side of her head and that the injuries were consistent with a baseball bat. In the “alibi” version of the factually incorrect confession, the defense attorney introduced documentation that indicated that Emily was in class during the time that the police believed Anna was murdered, implying that Emily could not have been at the crime scene (and did not go golfing). Therefore, revealing this inconsistency also provided an alibi for Emily. In the “no alibi” version of the factually incorrect confession, the defense attorney introduced documentation revealing that Anna was in class at the time that Emily said the murder took place. This information did not exclude Emily as a suspect and simply represented another incorrect detail in the confession. Despite the aforementioned factual errors, Officer Erikson still affirmed that he believed Emily had murdered Anna. Similar to Experiment 1, for conditions with a confession, the defense attorney contended that Emily gave a coerced confession, again proposing that the circumstances surrounding the interrogation were unreasonable (e.g., lengthy, occurred in small room with no windows).

During cross-examination, the defense attorney asked Officer Erikson how long the interrogation lasted. He responded with either 75 min or 12 hours. The defense attorney later repeated the time, and Officer Erikson confirmed it.

Manipulation checks and dependentmeasures

The three manipulation checks from Experiment 1 were included, but the options for the interrogation length differed (75 min or 12 hours). In addition, participants responded to a fourth manipulation check by selecting who was in class at the alleged time of the murder (Anna, Emily, or this was not mentioned). We also used the same dependent measures as for Experiment 1, including the identical four items for both perceived coercion (α = .77) and strength of the prosecution’s case (α = .81).

Over 97% of participants correctly recalled the interrogation length. About 95% correctly identified whether Emily had confessed during the interrogation. Over 86% of participants responded accurately to whether Emily provided information during the interrogation that conflicted with other case facts. More than 83% recalled correctly who was in class during the alleged time of the murder. Results did not noticeably change when analyses included only those participants who answered all manipulation checks correctly. Therefore, all participants were retained for analyses. See Table 2 for cell means and standard deviations.

Means and standards deviations of dependent measures (Experiment 2).

Note. N = 237 for coercion, N = 315 for Jared’s probability of guilt, and N = 316 for remaining measures. Standard deviations are in parentheses. Cell sizes vary from 38 to 40.

A main effect for confession correctness occurred, F (2, 231) = 4.12, p < .05, η 2 = .03. Two planned comparisons showed that participants perceived both types of factually incorrect confessions (with or without an alibi) as more coerced than a factually correct confession, F (1, 231) = 5.87, p < .05, η 2 = .02, and F (1, 231) = 6.51, p < .05, η 2 = .03, respectively. These results provided support for Hypothesis 1b rather than 1a. The two factually incorrect conditions did not differ, F (1, 231) = .02, p = .89, η 2 = .00. There was no main effect for interrogation length, F (1, 231) = .56, p = .45, η 2 = .00, and no interaction, F (2, 231) = .05, p = .96, η 2 = .00. Because of the insignificant interaction, Hypothesis 2 did not receive support.

The analysis for Emily’s probability of guilt revealed a main effect for confession correctness, F (3, 308) = 15.61, p < .001, η 2 = .13. We followed up this analysis with three planned comparisons. Participants perceived Emily as more guilty when she provided a factually correct confession than when she gave no confession, F (1, 308) = 40.14, p < .001, η 2 = .11. Compared to when Emily did not confess, participants judged her guilt similarly, whether she provided a factually incorrect confession with an alibi, F (1, 308) = 1.44, p = .23, η 2 = .00, or a factually incorrect confession without an alibi, F (1, 308) = 2.22, p = .14, η 2 = .01. These results failed to support Hypothesis 3, because participants did not view Emily as guiltier when she gave a factually incorrect confession than when she did not confess at all. The two factually incorrect conditions did not differ, F (1, 308) = .09, p = .77, η 2 = .00. Neither the main effect for interrogation length, F (1, 308) = .57, p = .45, η 2 = .00, nor the interaction were significant, F (3, 308) = 1.23, p = .30, η 2 = .01.

Results for verdict paralleled the findings from the probability of guilt measure for Emily. For the 75-min interrogation, verdicts varied as a function of confession correctness, χ 2 (3, N = 157) = 35.74, p < .001. Participants delivered more guilty verdicts when Emily provided a factually correct confession rather than no confession, χ 2 (1, N = 78) = 27.13, p < .001, a factually incorrect confession (with alibi), χ 2 (1, N = 78) = 20.53, p < .001, or a factually incorrect confession (with no alibi), χ 2 (1, N = 77) = 17.85, p < .001. Remaining comparisons did not differ, χ 2 s < 1.29, p s>.26. Likewise, for the 12-hour interrogation, the pattern of verdicts showed the same pattern, χ 2 (3, N = 159) = 16.14, p < .01. Participants voted guilty more often when Emily gave a factually correct confession than when she gave no confession, χ 2 (1, N = 79) = 13.90, p < .001, a factually incorrect confession (with alibi), χ 2 (1, N = 80) = 7.22, p < .01, or a factually incorrect confession (with no alibi), χ 2 (1, N = 80) = 8.46, p < .01. Remaining comparisons did not differ, χ 2 s < 1.28, p s > .26. Similarly to judgments about Emily’s probability of guilt, these results for verdict failed to support Hypothesis 3, because participants did not deliver more guilty verdicts when Emily provided a factually incorrect confession than when she gave no confession at all.

A main effect occurred for confession correctness, F (3, 307) = 8.58, p < .001, η 2 = .08. 1 Three planned comparisons revealed that, compared to when Emily did not confess, participants perceived Jared as more guilty, whether Emily provided a factually correct confession, F (1, 307) = 24.02, p < .001, η 2 = .07, a factually incorrect confession (with alibi), F (1, 307) = 12.73, p < .001, η 2 = .04, or a factually incorrect confession (no alibi), F (1, 307) = 7.06, p < .01, η 2 = .02. These results supported Hypothesis 4, because participants viewed Jared as guiltier when Emily provided a factually incorrect confession than when she did not confess. For informational purposes, the factually correct condition differed significantly from the factually incorrect condition with no alibi, F (1, 307) = 5.07, p < .05, η 2 = .02, but remaining comparisons did not differ, F s < 1.81, p s>.18, η 2 s < .01. No significant results occurred for interrogation length, F (1, 307) = .04, p = .84, η 2 = .00, or the interaction, F (3, 307) = 1.72, p = .16, η 2 = .02.

The analysis revealed a significant effect of confession correctness, F (3, 308) = 26.48, p < .001, η 2 = .20. Three planned comparisons demonstrated that, compared to a case with no confession, participants perceived the prosecution’s case as stronger when Emily provided a factually correct confession, F (1, 308) = 76.56, p < .001, η 2 = .20, a factually incorrect confession (with alibi), F (1, 308) = 22.98, p < .001, η 2 = .06, or a factually incorrect confession (no alibi), F (1, 308) = 33.99, p < .001, η 2 = .09. These results provided support for Hypothesis 5, because participants perceived the prosecution’s case as stronger when Emily provided a factually incorrect confession rather than no confession at all. The two factually incorrect conditions did not differ significantly, F (1, 308) = 1.11, p = .29, η 2 = .00. Also, there were no significant effects for interrogation length, F (1, 308) = .90, p = .34, η 2 = .00, or the interaction, F (3, 308) = .19, p = .90, η 2 = .00.

Similarly to Experiment 1, a factually incorrect confession showed no lasting influence on judgments of Emily’s guilt, but it did affect participants’ decisions about Jared’s guilt and the strength of the prosecution’s case. One notable difference involved the lack of significant or marginal effects with the interrogation length manipulation. The change in the interrogation length manipulation may explain this difference. Because we increased the times for both the long and the short interrogation, participants may have perceived both interrogations as longer than necessary, thus reducing the perceived difference between the two lengths. Moreover, the alibi information, which participants learned about after other factual errors, did not influence participants’ judgments. This finding supports the preference-consistent interpretation of some alibi research. Once participants learned about the factually incorrect nature of the confession, the alibi information did not further change their judgments.

General Discussion

Many criminal cases have included confessions from suspects that contradicted other case facts, sometimes resulting in wrongful convictions. Our research investigated how factually incorrect confessions influence perceptions of coercion and the legal judgments of mock jurors. Contrary to previous research showing the highly influential nature of confession evidence (e.g., Henkel, 2008 ; Kassin & Sukel, 1997 ), participants fully discounted a factually incorrect confession on judgments of the defendant’s guilt. This finding suggests some limits to the powerful impact of confession evidence (see Kassin, 2012 ) and aligns with recent research demonstrating that participants discount factually incorrect confessions (Palmer et al., 2016 ). In fact, using lengthier trial transcripts rather than a one-page summary, we replicated a key result from Palmer et al. ( 2016 ), by showing that participants fully discounted factually incorrect confessions when assessing a defendant’s guilt. The current research is also consistent with recent research showing that confessions given under high-pressure circumstances that are not corroborated by other evidence lead to greater judgments of coerciveness and lower perceptions of guilt (Shaked-Schroer, Costanzo, & Berger, 2015 ). In the current research, Emily’s confession was not corroborated by other evidence, especially in the factually incorrect conditions. Moreover, the current research extended the work by Palmer et al. ( 2016 ), demonstrating that the influence of a factually incorrect confession persisted on judgments about an alleged accomplice and the strength of the prosecution’s case. The continued influence of these confessions despite their coerced nature is consistent with past research (e.g., Kassin & Sukel, 1997 ). The lingering effects of the confession on a named accomplice may partly explain why people have been convicted wrongfully even with factually incorrect confessions. In the case of the Central Park Five, the boys provided confessions that conflicted with one another and with case facts, but each boy’s confession may have served to build the case against the others.

In their research, Woestehoff and Meissner ( 2016 ) found that their participants discounted confessions given under pressure, with or without expert testimony. They also demonstrated that participants’ knowledge about risk factors of false confessions correlated with fewer convictions. As an explanation of these findings, the authors speculated that the general public has more knowledge of wrongful convictions and the role that false confessions play, because of more depictions of these events in the media, both fictional and real. Therefore, research participants of today may be more likely to discount confession evidence compared to research participants in the past (e.g., Kassin & Sukel, 1997 ). In our research, we also found that participants fully discounted a factually incorrect confession when rating the defendant’s guilt. This result is consistent with Woestehoff and Meissner’s speculation that media portrayals of wrongful convictions have increased people’s sensitivity to false-confession risk factors. However, factually incorrect confessions still influenced our participants’ judgments about an alleged accomplice and the prosecution’s case. These results may suggest a different process. Rather than possessing more knowledge about false-confession risk factors, our participants may have been convinced that Emily was covering for Jared. Therefore, participants tended to acquit Emily, whereas they still believed in Jared’s guilt and the strength of the prosecution’s case. Of course, this explanation could be framed in terms of false-confession risk factors, especially because people do falsely confess to protect others (Malloy et al., 2014 ).

Although confession correctness influenced participants’ judgments, information about interrogation length played a smaller role in their judgments. Perhaps, seeing the long interrogation would have a greater impact on participants’ judgments. Even so, the manipulation produced some effects in Experiment 1. Participants viewed longer interrogations as marginally more coercive. Also, interrogation length influenced participants’ judgments about the defendant’s guilt. When participants used the confession evidence to judge the defendant’s guilt, they differentiated less between factually correct and factually incorrect confessions the longer the defendant was interrogated. Such a finding points to the value of keeping interrogations short, not only to protect the innocent but also to preserve the impact of real confessions. However, Experiment 2 did not replicate these results. Therefore, these findings are tentative.

Moreover, this research has implications for other legal practitioners – for instance, prosecutors, police officers, and judges. Although jurors are primarily concerned with determining whether or not a defendant is guilty, lawyers and law enforcement officials contemplate more general judgments, such as whether enough evidence exists to prosecute or whether there are accomplices. Participants in our study tended to fully discount the influence of factually incorrect confessions on a defendant’s guilt but not on these other judgments. To the extent that a factually incorrect confession bolsters a prosecutor’s stance on a case, he or she may be emboldened to pursue legal action. This judgment could begin a vicious cycle, especially because confessions tend to taint perceptions of other evidence (Kassin, Bogart, & Kerner, 2012 ). However, more research should be conducted with these legal practitioners to determine whether their opinions and judgments are similar to those of our participants.

Limitations

Despite the groundwork laid by this research into the area of factually incorrect confessions, it does possess limitations. First, participants consisted of college students. Even though college students are jury-eligible, they do not reflect the entire cross-section of the population. Nevertheless, some research suggests few differences in legal decisions between college and non-college samples (Bornstein, 1999 ). Studies that do show a difference between these groups sometimes provide contradicting conclusions, such as which group is more lenient (Hosch, Culhane, Tubb, & Granillo, 2011 ; Keller & Wiener, 2011 ). Second, the materials used in our research lacked the full realism of actual trials. For example, participants simply read a transcript. They did not view the confession evidence and could not use nonverbal cues to make judgments about the case. The trial was also comparatively short. However, Bornstein ( 1999 ) did not find vastly different conclusions between studies that varied in realism. Third, our studies did not make use of interacting juries. Therefore, we do not know how group influences would change final judgments, if at all. Despite this limitation, jurors make judgments prior to deliberation, and so it is important to understand the influences on these initial judgments. Finally, because participants only read a written account of the confession, their judgments could not be affected by the interrogation tactics used or the camera perspective of the confession.

Future Directions

Although participants fully discounted factually incorrect confessions when making judgments about a defendant’s guilt, jurors might not fully discount these confessions in all circumstances. Previous research has shown situation-specific discounting of problematic confessions (Henkel, 2008 ). Moreover, the story model of juror decision making (Pennington & Hastie, 1992 ) says that jurors generate narratives to make sense of evidence. Consequently, jurors may not fully discount a factually incorrect confession, depending upon how it fits into the larger story. For example, if it is not believable that the defendant committed a heinous crime, then jurors might favor a story involving a false confession, especially when it is factually incorrect. In our research, Emily may have seemed like an unlikely perpetrator, especially given that men commit the majority of the world’s murders. Therefore, participants discounted her factually incorrect confession. Conversely, if the defendant fits the profile of the crime, jurors may overlook errors in a confession and generate a story about the defendant being a habitual liar. The Central Park Five had been part of a “wilding” in the park, and therefore their guilt seemed more plausible to the jury despite the factual errors in their confessions. Similarly, in our studies Jared may have better fit the profile of a killer, because he was male. His maleness might account for why participants still believed in his guilt, but not in Emily’s, when Emily provided a factually incorrect confession. Moreover, whether the defendant tried to retract the confession may also influence jurors’ judgments. Retractions are more common for false confessions than for true confessions (Malloy et al., 2014 ). Thus, attempts at retraction might be diagnostic of the confession’s legitimacy.

Finally, by allowing participants to view the confession evidence, the camera perspective can be manipulated. Prior research shows that confessions focused on the interrogator rather than the suspect are perceived as more coercive (Lassiter, Diamond, Schmidt, & Elek, 2007 ). Consequently, jurors might be more likely to fully discount factually incorrect confessions focused on the interrogator. Likewise, jurors might be more willing to overlook the factual errors in confessions focused on the suspect because of perceptions of greater voluntariness.

1 One participant did not provide a rating, so analyses have one less degree of freedom in the denominator.

Ethical standards

Declaration of conflicts of interest.

Eric E. Jones has declared no conflicts of interest

Abby D. Bandy has declared no conflicts of interest

Phillip Palmer has declared no conflicts of interest

Ethical approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study

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Law and Crime

The psychology of false confessions, why would any innocent person falsely confess to committing a crime.

Posted September 8, 2020 | Reviewed by Matt Huston

“He’s clearly guilty—he even confessed!”

While popular understanding may suggest that innocent people simply do not confess to crimes (“I would never confess to doing something that I did not actually do!”), the surprising fact is that false confessions happen—and perhaps more frequently than we would like to believe.

According to the National Registry of Exonerations, there have been over 2,500 exonerations since 1989, representing more than 23,950 years that innocent Americans spent in prison. Surprisingly, approximately 12% of these defendants had falsely confessed to committing the crime. This indicates not only that false confessions happen, but that hundreds of people have falsely confessed to crimes that they did not commit.

According to social psychologist Dr. Saul Kassin, false confessions can be categorized into three general types: voluntary false confessions, persuaded (or internalized) false confessions, and compliant false confessions.

Voluntary False Confessions

Voluntary false confessions are explained by the internal psychological states or needs of the confessor or by external pressure brought to bear on the confessor by someone other than the police or someone in authority. Voluntary false confessions are frequently attributed to underlying psychological or psychiatric disorders. For example, individuals may feel compelled to falsely confess out of a desire for attention , because they desire to punish themselves, or because they are genuinely out of touch with reality. However, voluntary false confessions may also arise from completely rational motives: for example, out of a desire to protect the true perpetrator.

Interestingly, police tend to be more skeptical of voluntary false confessions than of confessions induced by the police, despite the fact that the former represents a “truer” confession in the sense that it was made freely and without pressure or interference from the state.

Persuaded False Confessions

Persuaded (or internalized) false confessions occur when interrogation tactics cause an innocent suspect to doubt his memory and he genuinely becomes persuaded—whether temporarily or permanently—that it is more likely than not that he committed the crime, despite having no memory of committing it.

This raises the question: How can an interrogator possibly convince an innocent person that he or she is guilty? Wouldn’t the suspect know whether or not he or she committed the crime?

Persuaded false confessions tend to result from long and intense interrogations that may include:

Repeated accusations that the suspect committed the crime
Adamant discrediting of the suspect’s denials (for example, by saying that the denial is contradicted by known facts)
Fabrications of evidence of guilt (for example, by saying that an eyewitness said that the suspect committed the crime, when no such eyewitness actually exists)
Eventually, an offer to resolve the cognitive dissonance experienced by the suspect (for example, by saying, “it’s possible you repressed the memory of doing it”)

Studies have shown that we may be much more susceptible to making a persuaded false confession than we realize. One such experiment, conducted by Kassin, involved having students typing on keyboards. He told the students beforehand that the system had a glitch and told them not to hit the “Alt” key, because doing so would crash the computer. What the students did not know was that each computer was already pre-programmed to crash, without the “Alt” key being pressed. After each computer crashed, the student was then accused of pressing the “Alt” key.

At first, all of the students denied hitting the “Alt” key. However, once Kassin introduced a few variables (based on actual police interrogation tactics), the students began to (falsely) confess. For example, when students were told that a witness saw them hit the “Alt” key, those students confessed at more than double the rate of students paired with witnesses that said they had not seen anything. Some students internalized their (false) guilt so deeply that they even came up with excuses for hitting the “Alt” key, such as “I hit the wrong key with the side of my hand.”

Compliant False Confessions

Compliant false confessions are given to escape a stressful situation, avoid punishment , or gain a promised or implied reward. The most notable thing about a compliant false confession is that it is made knowingly: the suspect admits guilt with the knowledge that he is innocent and that what he says is false.

Compliant false confessions may be obtained through physical pressure (for example, torture) but can also be elicited through psychological pressure. For example, a police interrogator may try to convince a suspect that he will inevitably be found guilty in court if he does not confess. Even though the suspect knows that he did not commit the crime, the entire trial and evidentiary process might be so foreign and frightening to him that he believes the interrogator. At the same time, the interrogator might try to convince the suspect that confessing will lead to much more lenient outcomes.

Even in the absence of coercive threats and promises, stress and a desire to escape the interrogation may also lead to false confessions. Custodial interrogations are inherently stressful and unpleasant experiences, and a suspect may reach a point where he is willing to falsely confess just to stop the confrontation.

Another interesting possibility is that sometimes compliant false confessions may be given, ironically, due to the suspect’s confidence in his or her innocence, coupled with his or her faith in the criminal justice system. In Kassin’s “Alt” key study discussed above, students who were told that every keystroke had been recorded were much more likely to falsely confess. This is interesting because, if anything, each student should have been less likely to confess given that none of them actually hit the “Alt” key. However, it is possible that these students confessed just to get out of the conversation, persuaded that once the server records were examined, that they would be receiving an apology . This would be similar to a suspect who, upon being told that DNA evidence was being collected from the crime scene, decides to say whatever the police want him to say because he figures that the evidence would later clear them once the truth comes out.

What this research tells us is not only should we abandon the idea that no innocent person in their right mind would confess to a crime, but that in some situations, it is rational—or at least extremely understandable—to falsely confess.

Disclaimer: This post is for informational purposes only and not for the purpose of providing legal advice. You should contact your attorney to obtain advice with respect to any particular issue or problem. Use of and access to this blog or any of the e-mail links contained within the site do not create an attorney-client relationship between the author and the user or browser. The opinions expressed at or through this site are the opinions of the individual author and may not reflect the opinions of any law firm, company, or Psychology Today.

Ruth Lee Johnson, J.D., is a graduate of Harvard Law School and an attorney specializing in complex business litigation.

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The exoneree falsely confessed if (1) he or she made a false statement to authorities which was treated as a confession, (2) the authorities claimed that the exoneree made such a statement but the exoneree denied it, or (3) the exoneree made a statement that was not an admission of guilt, but was misinterpreted as such by the authorities.

What causes people to give false confessions? (Tribune)

Case Examples

The Dixmoor Five
The Roscetti 4
Lavelle Burt
Franklin Thompson

Reforms that would have prevented most of the documented Illinois false confessions are these:

Limiting the duration of interrogations. A national study by Steven A. Drizin of the Center on Wrongful Convictions and Richard A. Leo of the University of California-Irvine (“The Problem of False Confessions in the Post-DNA World,” North Carolina Law Review, March 2004) found that 84% of false confessions occurred after interrogations of six hours or longer and that the average duration was more than 16 hours. Drizin and Leo recommend that interrogations in excess of 12 hours should be categorically inadmissible in court and those of more than six hours should be admissible only if the prosecution can establish beyond a reasonable doubt that they were voluntary.
Polygraphs and voice-stress analysis should be banned. There is in fact no reliable lie-detection technology, but innocent suspects often believe — and are led to believe — that the machines are reliable. Many suspects, thus, are eager to be tested, anticipating that the test will prove they are telling the truth. Then, they are devastated when told — often falsely — that they failed. Confessions then follow. The best remedy would be for the courts to suppress any statement made by suspects after they have been told that polygraphs or voice-stress analyzers indicated that they were lying.
Lying by interrogators, which occurs in virtually all false confession cases, should be strictly limited. Lying is presently permitted under 1969 Supreme Court decision known as Frazier v. Cupp. The interests of justice would be better served by the suppression of all confessions by juveniles, the mentally retarded, and the mentally ill to whom interrogators have lied. Likewise, confessions by normally functioning adults should be suppressed if they were told lies involving family members. Kevin Fox, for instance, was told that his wife no longer believed him and his family stopped loving him.
Implicit promises of leniency should be prohibited. Rarely do interrogators make explicit promises of leniency — for example, that if the suspect confesses, he will not be charged. If proven, such promises would result, under current law, in suppression of any ensuing confessions. Police, however, are taught a process known as pragmatic implication. The idea is to suggest alternative scenarios for crimes — one that it was cold, calculating, and premeditated, the other that it was impulsive, that the result was unintended, or that it was self-defense. The implication is clear — accepting the latter scenario will mitigate, or perhaps eliminate, punishment. To a suspect, even if innocent, it may seem reasonable to cut his losses and confess once he is convinced that continued denials would be futile. Implicit promises should be banned because their effect is the same as explicit ones.
Hypothesizing blackout scenarios, as was done in the Gary Gauger case, should be prohibited. When an innocent suspect like Gauger is led to believe there is rock-solid evidence that he committed a crime he cannot remember, the only remaining question is why he cannot reconcile the evidence with his memory. At this point, the interrogator offers an explanation — perhaps he committed the crime in a blackout or amnesiac trance. Then the suspect is asked to imagine how he might have committed it, and he compliantly begins to speculate. What he says, naturally, is likely to include information consistent with whatever facts of the crime he learned during his preceding interrogation. Those facts then are misconstrued as knowledge to which only someone involved in the crime would be privy. Because there no doubt are instances when guilty suspects feign memory loss, it would not be reasonable to prohibit police from ever advancing hypothetical amnesiac scenarios. However, any statement that follows should be suppressed unless the prosecution can show by clear and convincing evidence that the statement includes a substantial amount of accurate information that was neither imparted during interrogation nor was in the public domain at the time.
Judges should hold pretrial reliability hearings before confessions are admitted into evidence. Under current law, the only prerequisite is that confessions be voluntary. Reliability simply is not an issue. This should change. Reliability hearings already are common regarding other kinds of evidence — eyewitness identifications, informant testimony, novel forensic evidence, and hearsay. There is no logical reason that confessions should be an exception. There already is a general consensus on what makes an inculpatory statement reliable — substantial corroboration, which is amenable to objective examination before trial. It certainly seems that the question of reliability of a confession is more likely to be accurately resolved by a judge in pretrial proceedings than by a jury in the emotion-charged atmosphere of trial.

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PDF Problem Solving Activity: Untrue Confessions
The eighth confessions will reveal the murderer. Follow the steps below to complete your investigation. Objective: To use the steps in scientific problem solving to solve a hypothetical murder. Procedure: 1. Read the Introduction carefully. In question form, write the problem that you are faced with in this activity in the box entitled: Problem ...
untrue confessions worksheet.docx
Problem Solving Activity: Untrue Confessions Introduction: A frightful homicide has been committed at the Peaceful Hills Asylum for Unbelievably unbalanced Persons. This very progressive hospital treats people with the most exotic mental illnesses known to science. It has the world's only ward set aside for patients who think they are power drills and a meadow reserved for one woman who ...
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In this movie, you learn about a killer in a small town that killed about 20 prostitutes in a small town in the early 80s. When the crimes are first commited DNA evidence can be gathered but they ...
Demystifying False Confessions
The term, false confession, is actually a misnomer. A confession is a rational decision by someone who chooses to accept responsibility for his or her actions when the guilt of the crime becomes too much to bear. ... The problem is that the police can be wrong. In his November 12, 2012, review of "The Central Park Five," Los Angeles Times ...
The Science-Based Pathways to Understanding False Confessions and
Expert Testimony and Judicial Resistance. A recent survey of experts in the field of confessions (Kassin et al., 2018) has shown a consensus that there is a sufficient evidence base to assist jurors in their evaluation of the reliability of confession evidence.Not only were explicit threats and promises during police interviews seen as risk factors for false confessions, but also false ...
False confessions aren't always what they seem, with Saul Kassin, PhD
Saul Kassin is a distinguished professor of psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. Kassin pioneered the scientific study of false confessions. He has also studied the effect confessions have on judges, juries, lay witnesses, forensic science examiners and the plea bargaining process. His research has been funded by the ...
Revisiting the False Confession Problem
Studies on False Confessions. Several researchers have studied the effects of interrogation techniques in controlled environments. For example, in 1996 Kassin and Kiechel 30 developed the "ALT key" paradigm in which participants had to perform a computer task without hitting the ALT key on the computer keyboard. The participant was told that hitting the key would cause the computer to ...
False Confessions: Causes, Consequences, and Implications for Reform
Abstract. In recent years, DNA exoneration cases have shed light on the problem of false confessions and the wrongful convictions that result. Drawing on basic psychological principles and methods, an extensive body of research has focused on the psychology of confessions. This article describes the processes of interrogation by which police ...
Inside Interrogation: The Lie, The Bluff, and False Confessions
Using a less deceptive variant of the false evidence ploy, interrogators often use the bluff tactic, whereby they pretend to have evidence to be tested without further claiming that it necessarily implicates the suspect. Three experiments were conducted to assess the impact of the bluff on confession rates. Using the Kassin and Kiechel (Psychol Sci 7:125-128, 1996) computer crash paradigm ...
Untrue Confessions Answers Worksheets
Untrue Confessions Answers - Displaying top 5 worksheets found for this concept.. Some of the worksheets for this concept are To be perfectly honest pdf, 50 great myths of popular psychology, Chapter i chapter ii chapter i chapter iv chapter v, Living between worlds place and journey in celtic, Living things and their environment work pdf.
False Confessions: Causes, Consequences, and Implications
In the past two decades, hundreds of convicted prisoners have been exonerated by DNA and non-DNA evidence, revealing that police-induced false confessions are a leading cause of wrongful conviction of the innocent. In this article, empirical research on the causes and correlates of false confessions is reviewed. After a description of the three sequential processes that are responsible for the ...
Confession Worksheet Teaching Resources
This worksheet has been designed to accompany the PowerPoint in this store titled, Confessions by Augustine (a 46-slide presentation). It consists of a total of 19 questions: 17 multiple-choice, true/false, and fill-in-the-blank questions2 short-essay questionsThe worksheet also includes an answer key on the last page.
Interview and interrogation methods and their effects on true and false
The elicitation of false confessions is an international problem that has been documented in almost every continent (Kassin et al., 2010; Lassiter & Meissner, 2010). Two general factors have been linked to the incidence of false confessions: personal (psychological) vulnerabilities of the individual and the use of accusatorial (psychologically ...
Distinguishing true from false confessions using ...
The experiment was divided into five distinct parts: personality questionnaires (for exploratory analyses), problem-solving assignments (allowing to engage in rule-breaking behavior), the interrogation (aimed at eliciting a confession), the CIT (aimed at distinguishing true from false confessions) and an elaborate debriefing. 1.2.1.
How to improve your problem solving skills and strategies
6. Solution implementation. This is what we were waiting for! All problem solving strategies have the end goal of implementing a solution and solving a problem in mind. Remember that in order for any solution to be successful, you need to help your group through all of the previous problem solving steps thoughtfully.
False Confessions
A false confession is a narrative admission to a crime that is made, orally or in writing, by an innocent person. Research shows that innocent people may confess in different ways and for different reasons—resulting in three types of false confessions: voluntary, compliant, and internalized. From an empirical perspective, this entry addresses ...
Revisiting the False Confession Problem
A compliant false confession occurs youths with mental illnesses, a heightened risk of a when the suspect knowingly succumbs to "police co- false confession is created in the interrogation ercion, stress, or pressure to achieve some instrumen- room.24 tal benefit" (Ref. 4, p 338) to finish and escape the stressful experience of an ...
"I Did It, But Not Like That": Effects of Factually Incorrect
The current research investigated the effects of factually incorrect confessions on juror judgments. In Experiment 1, participants read a trial transcript, containing either no confession, a factually correct confession, or a factually incorrect confession after a 1-hour or 10-hour interrogation. Afterwards, participants judged the coerciveness ...
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PDF False Confessions: Causes, Consequences, and Implications for Reform
First, police sometimes target innocent people for interrogation because of erroneous judgments of truth and deception. Second, innocent people sometimes confess as a function of certain interrogation tactics, dispositional suspect vul-nerabilities, and the phenomenology of innocence. Third, jurors fail to discount even those confessions they ...
False and Coerced Confessions
A national study by Steven A. Drizin of the Center on Wrongful Convictions and Richard A. Leo of the University of California-Irvine ("The Problem of False Confessions in the Post-DNA World," North Carolina Law Review, March 2004) found that 84% of false confessions occurred after interrogations of six hours or longer and that the average ...
PDF THE PROBLEM-SOLVING PROCESS ANSWER KEY A. TRUE/FALSE T F T F is valid
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