THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYSo why do people make false confessions? One problem is that inno-
cent people often turn down their legal rights – to a legal representative
or to remain silent – for fear that assuming these rights will make
them look guilty. The police can also be persuasive. They might tell
a suspect that their punishment will be far less severe if they confess.
Another factor is the power of suggestion. As Elizabeth Loftus’s work
has shown, it is very easy for people to come to believe in entirely
fabricated memories, and crucially, in many jurisdictions, the law only
requires the police to provide a tape of the confession, not the inter-
rogation that led to it. Saul Kassin, among others, is campaigning for
this to be changed.
Other psychologists have looked at the type of interrogations that
are most likely to lead to a false confession. In an experiment in which
students were tricked into thinking that a computer they were working
on had crashed, Jessica Flaver at Simon Fraser University found that
so-called “minimizing” remarks were more likely to provoke the students
into falsely confessing that they’d caused the crash. This included
remarks that downplayed the “crime”, such as “don’t worry, it was just an
accident” or “this programme seems not to be working lately”.
Avoiding death row
Make sure you come across as sorry and sincere. Based on his interviews
with eighty jurors who had played a part in real-life murder cases,
Michael Antonio found that defendants who were perceived by jurors
to be sorry and sincere were more likely to be sentenced to life impris-
onment than to be sentenced to death. On the other hand, defendants
who appeared bored or who looked frightening were more likely to be
given the death penalty. That’s despite jurors being instructed to make
their decision based only on the legal facts of the case.