Sex offenders’ perceptions of the effectiveness and fairness of humanity,dominance, and displaying an understanding of cognitive distortions in police interviews: A vignette study

Abstract

Forty-three convicted sex offenders read each of four different offence vignettes that involved a man forcing a female victim into sex and the offender's subsequent police interview. The experimental manipulation involved giving participants each of four different scenarios concerning how the police interviewed the offender. These were interviews characterized by humanity, dominance, displaying an understanding of sex offenders’ cognitive distortions, or a neutral, control interview. Participants were required to rate the interviews on a variety of dimensions, such as the offender's likelihood of confessing, and the fairness of the interview. Where participants were told the man had been interviewed with humanity and compassion, they rated the offender as more likely to confess and rated the interview as fairer than the other conditions. In contrast, participants rated the offender interviewed with a dominant approach as less likely to confess, and for this procedure to be less fair than the other conditions. Displaying an understanding of sex offenders’ cognitive distortions appeared to have had no influence on perceived likelihood of confessions but was perceived to make the crime appear less serious.     

How do sex offenders think the police should interview to elicit confessions from sex offenders?

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to explore sex offenders' perceptions of how the police should interview suspected sex offenders to facilitate confessions, and to investigate whether there is a relationship between sex offenders' perceptions of how the police interviewed them and their decisions to confess or deny. Forty-three convicted sex offenders were interviewed using two 35-item questionnaires that contained five questions on each of seven interviewing strategies. An additional 20 violent offenders were included for comparison purposes. The strategies were evidence presenting strategies, ethical interviewing, displays of humanity, displays of dominance, use of minimization and maximization techniques, and demonstrating an understanding of sex offenders' cognitive distortions. One questionnaire concerned how the police should interview sex offenders and the other concerned how they perceived the police who interviewed them. Generally speaking, evidence presenting strategies, ethical interviewing, and displays of humanity were perceived to increase the likelihood of a confession. Interviewer dominance was perceived to be associated with a reduction in the likelihood of a confession.     

Younger and older adults’ lie-detection and credibility judgments of children's coached reports

ABSTRACT

Previous research has examined young and middle-aged adults’ perceptions of child witnesses; however, no research to date has examined how potential older adult jurors may perceive a child witness. The present investigation examined younger (18–30 years, N?=?100) and older adults’ (66–89 years, N?=?100) lie-detection and credibility judgments when viewing children's truthful and dishonest reports. Participants viewed eight child interview videos where children (9–11 years of age) either provided a truthful report or a coached fabricated report to conceal a transgression. Participants provided lie-detection judgments following all eight videos and credibility assessments following the first two videos. Participants completed a General Lifespan Credibility questionnaire to assess credibility evaluations across various witness ages. Lie-detection results indicated that older adults had significantly lower discrimination scores, a stronger truth bias, and greater confidence compared to younger adults. Older adults also rated children as more competent to testify in court, credible, honest, believable, and likeable than younger adults. Participants with greater differences in their credibility evaluations for truth and lie-tellers were significantly more accurate at detecting lies. Responses to the Lifespan Credibility questionnaire revealed significant differences in younger and older adults’ credibility evaluations across the lifespan.     

Psychopathy and deception detection using indirect measures

Purpose. The goal of the current study was to examine psychopathy and indirect measures of deception detection. Methods. Undergraduate students (N=444) viewed video clips of adult male offenders telling true and false stories about crimes. For each story, participants rated indirect measures of deception (thinking hard, nervousness, emotional arousal, and attempting to control behaviour) and credibility. Participants also chose the story they believed to be true and rated the confidence in their decision. Offenders were rated on the psychopathy checklist – revised. Results. Consistent with past research, deception detection accuracy was at chance level and unrelated to confidence. Ratings on indirect measures by undergraduates did not distinguish true and false statements in offenders. Psychopathic offenders were less successful at deception than non‐psychopathic offenders. Psychopathic traits were associated with lower perceived credibility during deception and ratings of thinking harder while lying. Conclusions. The results suggest that indirect measures of deception detection may be less useful in offender samples. Further, the findings are consistent with the general inability of psychopathic offenders to demonstrate superior deception skills in empirical studies. Indirect measures of deception uniquely related to psychopathic traits offer new insight into the relationship between psychopathy and deception.     

Police interviewing techniques at two south london police stations

Abstract

This paper analyses the techniques used by police officers at two South London Police Stations: Orpington and Peckham. Audio tapes of 161 police interviews were analysed with regard to their duration, type of techniques employed, suspects' reactions, and the number of confessions obtained. The findings reveal that the great majority of the interviews are short, non-confrontational, and that exchanges are conducted with polite and compliant suspects. The Orpington suspects were significantly more ‘co-operative’ than their Peckham counterparts which may reflect quite different social and demographic conditions. In only a fifth of the cases did the police employ any challenging tactics to question the suspect's version of events. Overall, there were fewer coercive or manipulative tactics employed compared with earlier studies although the number of confessions or admissions obtained has remained relatively constant. Recommendations are made for police interview training to reflect these findings.     

Offenders’ uncoerced false confessions: A new application of statement analysis?

Purpose. Deception detection research has mainly studied denials and distortions given by students. This study examined true and false confessions as told by offenders. It was hypothesized that the statement analytic techniques Criteria‐Based Content Analysis (CBCA) and Reality Monitoring (RM) would discriminate truths and lies. Methods. Truthful and deceptive confessions to crime were given by 30 offenders (both women and men) in a within‐subject design. The participants were in prison at the time of data collection, and told the truth about a crime they had committed and been sentenced for. In addition, they made up a lie about a different crime after a few minutes of preparation. The transcribed statements were scored for CBCA and RM criteria. Results. Results showed that neither total CBCA nor total RM scores differentiated between lies and truths. Some individual CBCA criteria, however, showed differences: more self‐deprecations and doubts about own testimony in the told lies, and more unexpected complications in the truths. Conclusions. The results are discussed in relation to statement analysis of offenders’ accounts, individual CBCA criteria, as well as the development of criminal experience and familiarity with the event and setting. Implications for triers of fact and suggestions for future research are considered.     

“I'm Innocent!”: Effects of Training on Judgments of Truth and Deception in the Interrogation Room

The present research examined the extent to which people can distinguish true and false denials made in a criminal interrogation, and tested the hypothesis that training in the use of verbal and nonverbal cues increases the accuracy of these judgments. In Phase One, 16 participants committed one of four mock crimes (breaking and entering, vandalism, shoplifting, a computer break-in) or a related but innocent act. Given incentives to deny involvement rather than confess, these suspects were then interrogated. In Phase Two, 40 observers were either trained in the analysis of verbal and nonverbal deception cues or not trained before viewing the videotaped interrogations and making their judgments. As in past studies conducted in nonforensic settings, observers were generally unable to distinguish between truthful and deceptive suspects. In addition, those who underwent training were less accurate than naive controls—though they were more confident and cited more reasons for their judgments. The implications of these findings are discussed in light of what is known about police interrogations, false confessions, and the wrongful conviction of innocent suspects.     

Halfe the world knowes not how the other halfe lies: Investigation of verbal and non‐verbal signs of deception exhibited by criminal offenders and non‐offenders

Purpose. This study examined the verbal and non‐verbal behaviours exhibited by criminal offender and non‐offender participants while they related planned truthful and deceptive accounts about emotional autobiographical events. Methods. In a 2 × 2 (participant group × veracity) quasi‐experimental design, offenders (N = 27) and university students (N = 38) provided videotaped accounts of four autobiographical emotional events: two honest and two fabricated (counterbalanced). Patterns of behaviour exhibited during the truthful and the deceptive accounts were then compared. Results. In general, offenders and non‐offenders showed similar patterns of deceptive behaviour. Deceptive accounts by both groups contained fewer details than honest accounts. Deception was associated with an increase in illustrator usage and self‐manipulations; however, univariate analyses indicated only that offenders exhibited significantly more self‐manipulations when lying. A significant interaction emerged in which offenders showed a reduction in smiles when lying about the emotional events, while students showed no difference. Conclusions. Offenders and students showed similar patterns of lying on most cues. However, unlike non‐offenders, offenders smiled less and showed an increase in self‐manipulations when lying. We theorize that offenders may have been aware that smiling and laughing are negatively related to perceived credibility in the speaker and used self‐manipulations to distract listeners from the content of their lies.     

High-Risk Interrogation: Using the “Mr. Big Technique” to Elicit Confessions

Kassin et al. (Police-Induced Confessions: Risk Factors and Recommendation, 2009) provide a detailed and thoughtful analysis of how police interrogation practices might elicit false confessions from innocent suspects. The purpose of this commentary is to provide a brief review of a relatively recent development in Canadian police investigation practice and discuss how this procedure may increase the likelihood of police-induced false confessions. The so-called “Mr. Big Technique” is a non-custodial interrogation tactic wherein suspects are drawn into a supposed criminal organization (actually an elaborate police sting) and subsequently told that to move up in the organization, they must confess to a crime. In this article, we describe this remarkable interrogation technique and discuss issues relevant to the potential induction of false confessions.     

Measuring interrogative suggestibility in children: Reliability and validity of the bonn test of statement suggestibility

Abstract

The present paper describes three studies that examined false confessions in the laboratory. Studies 1 (N=56) and 2 (N=9) relied on the by now classic computer crash paradigm introduced by Kassin and Kiechel (Psychological Science, 7, 125–128, 1996). Study 3 (N=12) employed a novel paradigm in which undergraduate participants were falsely accused of exam fraud. Our data indicate that false confessions do occur, even when conditions become more ecologically valid. Furthermore, we explored whether individual differences in compliance, suggestibility, fantasy proneness, dissociation, and cognitive failures are related to false confessions. Of these, only fantasy proneness was associated with false confessions.     

Self-Reported False Confessions and False Guilty Pleas among Offenders with Mental Illness

Persons with mental illness may be at risk for false admissions to police and to prosecutors because of the defining characteristics of mental illness, but potentially because of heightened recidivism rates and increased opportunities. We surveyed 1,249 offenders with mental disorders from six sites about false confessions (FCs) and false guilty pleas (FGPs). Self-reports of FC ranged from 9 to 28%, and FGPs ranged from 27 to 41% depending upon site. False admissions to murder and rape were rarely reported. We also examined differences between those claiming false admissions and those not. Minorities, offenders with lengthier criminal careers, and those who were more symptomatic were more likely to have self-reported false admissions than their counterparts.     

Perceptions of children during a police interrogation: Guilt,confessions, and interview fairness

Abstract

Jurors are often provided with confession evidence and must determine whether the confession was true, false, coerced, or voluntary. As more juveniles are tried in adult criminal court, jurors must increasingly make these determinations about minors’ statements. In this study, mock jurors read an actual interrogation of a child suspect that included confession evidence, and then provided judgments regarding the coerciveness of the interrogation, the child's and police's knowledge and behaviors, and guilt. Child age (11 versus 14 years) and gender were manipulated and examined in relation to participant gender and pre-existing sympathy levels for juvenile offenders. Factors external to the suspect – participant gender and sympathy for juvenile offenders – interacted with child suspect factors to influence perceptions of the child, the interrogation, and guilt. When multiple factors were considered, perceptions of suspect credibility and police fairness were the strongest predictors of guilt and perceived culpability. The findings have implications for decision-making in cases involving juvenile defendants and confession evidence.     

Individualization,criminalization, or problem resolution: A factorial survey of juvenile court judges' decisions to incarcerate youthful felony offenders

Existing research on the criteria used by juvenile court judges in choosing dispositions is limited in two respects. First, the predictor variables included in most investigations have been limited either in number or in the quality of their measurement. Second, research has not focused on sentencing decisions for serious offenders. Using a factorial survey of juvenile court judges, the present study seeks to determine what factors shape disposition decisions for juvenile felony offenders. The results suggest that judges focus primarily on offense characteristics, and are influenced only marginally by the offender's social characteristics. These findings are more consistent with the view that juvenile courts are becoming “criminalized” than with the view that individualized treatment is the goal. An alternative interpretation—that judges may be problem solvers, trying to dispose of cases efficiently—also is proposed.     

A field evaluation of the VIPER system: a new technique for eliciting eyewitness identification evidence

Abstract

The main aim of the study was to investigate the rate of claimed false confession during police questioning and identify variables that best discriminate between false confessors and non-false confessors. The participants were 24 627 high school students in seven countries in Europe. Out of 2726 who had been interrogated by the police as a suspect, 375 (13.8%) claimed to have made false confessions to the police. Logistic regression analyses showed that for both boys and girls, having attended substance abuse therapy, been attacked and bullied, and having committed a burglary, significantly discriminated between the false confessor and non-false confessor. In addition for boys, having been sexually abused by an adult outside the family was the single best predictor. The study shows the importance of history of victimization and substance misuse among adolescents in relation to giving a false confession to police during interrogation.     

Confessions and denials and the relationship with personality

Purpose. The main aim of the study was to examine the reasons and personality factors associated with confessions and denials. It was hypothesized that antisocial personality traits and active involvement in criminal behaviour would distinguish true confessors and true deniers from false confessors and false deniers. Method. The participants were 1,080 students in further education in Iceland. Each was asked about false admissions made to teachers and parents in the past, as well as about confessions or denials (true and false) made to the police during questioning, and the reasons for having responded in the way they did. The participants also completed questionnaires relating to offending, personality and self‐esteem. Results. One‐quarter (25%) of the participants stated that they had in the past been interrogated by the police in relation to a suspected offence, of whom 59% said they had confessed. A small minority of those interrogated (3.7%; 1% of the total sample) claimed to have made false confessions to the police, whereas 10% claimed to have made false confessions to teachers or parents. Males were significantly more likely to report false confessions than females. False confessions and false denials were significantly associated with antisocial personality traits, with Eysenck Personality Questionnaire Psychoticism being the single best predictor. Those participants who made true confessions and true denials were most normal in their personality. Conclusions. Personality is a significant predictor of who makes false confessions and false denials.     

The impact of extralegal factors on perceived credibility of child victims of sexual assault

ABSTRACT

The study examined the impact of victim age, victim gender, and perpetrator gender, across five domains of witness credibility: accuracy, believability, competency, reliability and truthfulness. The study also investigated which of these sub-constructs is the best predictor of guilt. 231 adult lay-people completed a survey measuring perceived credibility. Victim age emerged as having the most consistent effect, with the 5- and 10-year-old victims rated as more credible than the 15-year-old victim. Despite their legal incapacity to consent to sex, 15-year-old victims appear to be viewed as ‘quasi-adults’. Victims were rated as more accurate and truthful when the defendant was male compared to when the defendant was female. This may be due to the availability heuristic, as cases involving female defendants are less common. A significant main effect for victim gender was found for the competency sub-construct, such that males were rated as more competent than females. This result suggests that gendered attitudes and stereotypes may begin in childhood and extend to complainants of sexual assault. Main effects for accuracy and truthfulness, were qualified by three-way interaction effects. The five-factor model of perceived credibility accounted for 42% of variance in guilt perceptions, with truthfulness emerging as the strongest predictor of guilt.     

The interaction of truthful and deceptive information

ABSTRACT

Research consistently shows that truthful accounts are richer in detail than deceptive accounts. It is unknown, however, how interviewees strategically regulate the information they provide when their accounts contain both truthful and deceptive information. This study examined how truths and lies interact, and whether interviewees’ self-reported strategies reflect such interactions. Participants (n?=?144) provided one statement consisting of two elements. We manipulated the veracity of these elements, with participants allocated to either both truthful, both deceptive, or one truthful and the other deceptive conditions. Results indicated that interviewees calibrate the richness of detail provided in the first element of their statement based on the veracity of the following element. Moreover, our exploratory tests revealed that lies become more detailed when they are flanked by truthful information relative to when they are flanked by other deceptive information. The finding that truthful and deceptive information interacts to influence detail richness provides insight into liars’ strategic manipulation of information when statements contain a mixture of truths and lies. Strategic manipulations of this kind could potentially threaten the reliability of commonly used verbal lie detection tools. This study also offers insight to legal practitioners who rely on baseline deviations to assess credibility.     

Perceptions of coercion in interrogation: comparing expert and lay opinions

ABSTRACT

When confessions are entered into evidence in criminal courts, issues of coercion and voluntariness are important and often contested matters. Occasionally, defense attorneys proffer expert witnesses to testify about the coercive pressures of an interrogation and the risk of a false confession. Such testimony is often ruled inadmissible on the grounds that it does not inform the jury beyond its common knowledge. In our effort to test this judicial assumption about common knowledge, we surveyed jury-eligible laypeople (n?=?67) and social scientists specializing in interrogation and confessions (n?=?54) regarding their opinions about the coerciveness of prohibited interrogation tactics, maximization techniques, minimization techniques, and suspect risk factors and compared their ratings with a set of independent t tests. Laypeople gave lower ratings to the coerciveness of all sets of items representing interrogation techniques, and lower ratings to the vulnerabilities associated with suspect risk factors, as compared to social science experts. The disparities between laypeople’s and experts’ perceptions of coercion in interrogations demonstrate that such issues are not fully within the common knowledge of prospective jurors, and suggest the need to provide jurors with expert witness guidance when tasked with evaluating confession evidence.