Psychological Causes of Criminal Confessions: The Role of Interrogation Myopia

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DNA exonerations and laboratory experiments reveal that criminal suspects will sometimes falsely confess to crimes when interrogated by the police. This research will advance understanding of the processes that underlie suspects' decisions to confess by testing the predictions of a new theorietical model of confessions. The model proposes that stress elicited by police interrogation causes suspects to focus narrowly on the events and conditions operating in the immediate interrogation situation while simultaneously diverting their attention away from factors that are temporally remote, such as the future consequences that they may face if convicted. Ultimately, this narrowing of attentional focus is hypothesized to create a psychological state of interrogation myopia whereby suspects' choices are driven too much by the social and situational influences that are operating during the immediate interrogation situation, and too little by their long-term interests. Three experiments will examine whether stress, elicited through an accusation of cheating in an academic setting, influences how much people attend to and remember information that is directly relevant to consequences of academic misconduct, how vulnerable they are to social pressures that encourage them to confess, and whether their confession decisions are influenced more by immediate consequences (e.g., escaping an unpleasant situation now) than future consequences (e.g., avoiding punishment for wrong-doing in the future). The experiments are unique in that they assess stress in terms of physiology indexed by cardiovascular activity, a response to police interrogation that has received almost no empirical attention to date. The findings of this research will advance understanding of the psychological processes that lead suspects to confess to crimes during custodial police interrogations, thereby aiding reform efforts that are designed to improve the diagnostic value of confession evidence.