•  
  •  
 

Document Type

Poster Presentation

Abstract

The United States' criminal justice system relies heavily on criminal confessions for investigating and prosecuting crimes. Past experiments have shown that false incriminating evidence can lead people to falsely confess to crimes they did not commit. In our study, we examined whether certain interrogation techniques would elicit false confessions. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three interrogation conditions that varied in the amount of false incriminating evidence presented with the accusation: minimization condition; gives the participants a sense a false security, maximization condition; intimidates the participants, or a control condition; yes or no questions. Participants were (falsely) accused of damaging data from the study and were told that they faced reprimand from the professor in charge of the study. Each participant was interrogated using a controlled script and was asked to sign a confession. The initial research found no significant difference in the number of confessions, but the trends were in the predicted direction suggesting that with more power (additional data), there might be a significant difference.

Publication Date

2003

Journal Title

Conference Proceedings: Undergraduate Social Science Research Conference

Volume

7

Issue

1

First Page

243

Last Page

248

Copyright

©2003 by the University of Northern Iowa

Language

en

File Format

application/pdf

Publisher

University of Northern Iowa

City

Cedar Falls, IA

Download

Comments?

Share

COinS