2.2 The psychology of false confessions
You may have noticed that many of the exonerations involving a false confession that are described on The Innocence Project’s website involve cases from a number of years ago. Indeed, most predate the standard use of DNA testing and were obviously from the US.
Following several high-profile miscarriages of justice in the UK in the past, legal rules and regulations were introduced to protect suspects in the UK. These included the use of interview techniques that avoid coercing a suspect and, critically, that all interviews are recorded. Hopefully these measures have helped to reduce the incidence of false confessions. However, the psychology of false confessions remains a fascinating area of study that we would like you to further explore.
Psychologists interested in this area (e.g. Gudjonsson, 2003) tend to draw a distinction between two different types of confession that can arise as a result of the interview process. These are ‘coerced-compliant’ and ‘coerced-internalised’ and you may have found examples of both in the examples from The Innocence Project.
- Coerced-compliant confessions refer to confessions made when the suspect knows that they have not done what they are accused of, but they confess to escape the immediate situation of the interrogation.
- Coerced-internalised confessions differ in that the suspect comes to believe that they may have actually committed the act, for example, believing that maybe they blacked out during the relevant time period due to drinking too much.
There is also a third type of false confession called a voluntary false confession. Unlike the false confessions described above, voluntary false confessions don’t arise due to interview pressure. They describe a scenario where someone voluntarily claims to have committed a crime when they have not. This might involve handing themselves in at a police station claiming to be the culprit after they have seen a particular crime on the news. While this sounds unlikely, it is surprisingly common. For example, when the baby of famous aviator Charles Lindbergh was kidnapped in 1932 from his home in New Jersey, US, there were around 200 confessions. You’ll look at these voluntary false confessions in more detail later in the course.