Kassin, S. M., Meissner, C. A., & Norwick, R. J. (2005), “I’d Know a False Confession if I saw One”: A Comparative Study of College Students and Police Investigators. Law and Human Behavior, 29(2), 211-227
Due to the onslaught in recent years of convicts being released from prison after DNA evidence proved them innocent, large amounts of attention are being concentrated on why these people were convicted in the first place. Many of these cases are the result of false confessions (an example was given of a rape case in which five juveniles were convicted on false confessions. Previous research indicates that in general people are not very good at detecting truth and deception. Also, confessions have proven to be damning evidence and that even when shown to be coerced and false, jurors cannot disregard this evidence. Therefore a need exists to determine whether people, more specifically trained investigators can determine whether a confession is true or false in the hopes that these false confessions can be somehow stopped before they get to trial. Also, since past research has shown that people are better at determining truth based on auditory cues alone, this experiment seeks to test people’s abilities comparatively between video and audio tapes.
Experiment One:
17 inmates from a
Results show that accuracy was around chance (53.9%), and the hit rate was 63.6% vs. false alarm rate of 56.1%. It was found that ‘judgment accuracy and confidence were negatively correlated (r=-.23, p<.02). Students were found to be more accurate than investigators and accuracy was higher for the audio condition, consistent with previous research. While students were more accurate, investigators reported significantly higher levels of confidence. (see Table 1) Analyses showed that investigators had more false alarms, or in other words investigators had a response bias of judging the inmate guilty. Comparisons within the law enforcement group of those with deception detection training and those without yielded no significant difference in accuracy or confidence, but “it did correlate with the tendency to commit false alarms”.
The study shows that investigators are predisposed to perceive guilt, not necessarily deception. One interpretation for this is that it is the result of a systematic bias reducing accuracy. The second possibility is that the use of the half false/half true confessions confounded the study because that is at near impossible levels for real world rates.
Experiment Two
Experiment two seeks to eliminate the half false/half true problem by instructing participants that half of the statements in the tapes were true and half were false. Twenty one students and twenty local investigators were tested. The experiment was successful in eliminating the response bias and judgments across students and investigators in accuracy were not significantly different. In spite of this, investigators still displayed significantly higher ratings of confidence.
Discussion
The criminal justice system may not be perfect, but we tend to think that the safeguards built into the system protect us from human error. This study shows that this is not always the case. This research makes three important contributions: 1) “the results clarify the nature of the investigator response bias” 2) “the finding that investigators continues to exhibit a performance pattern of low accuracy and high confidence even when this guilt bias was neutralized” and 3) people are better judges of confessions when they listened to audiotapes of the statements than when they see complete audiovisual presentations” (although they are not advocating that we do away with video).
They suggest that the use of inmates might cause a problem with detection of deception that is intrinsic to the group, perhaps they are better at lying, or they lack the motivation that a real suspect might have. That said, these results are consistent with past research. Also, questions may be raised about the fact that the investigators here were merely making judgments and not actually interrogating the witness, but the high confidence ratings seem to negate this possibility. Also, it is important to note that these confessions are patently different from those generally given in real life situations which come after hours of coercion and theorizing and rehearsal.
Important Legal
Disclaimer: The preceding are articles we read together in the Lampinen Lab Fall 2005 false memory reading group. By
clicking on the button next to the article you can see the summary of that
article. The summary was prepared by the student presenting that article and it
is of course the case that the views expressed in the summary do not
necessarily represent the views of the reading group as a whole, Dr. Lampinen, the Lampinen Lab,
Hugo's, the University of Arkansas, the Razorback Football or Basketball teams
(although we're not sure about cross country), people living down the street
from us, Bob Dylan, Jack Fate, our extended families, or anyone else for that
matter except for the student who wrote the summary (and they don't necessarily
believe what they wrote either).