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Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
00:52:12
Have you ever been falsely accused of something? Many of us think there’s only one way we’d act in such a situation: we’d defend ourselves. We’d do whatever it takes to clear our name — and above all else, we’d never, ever confess to something we didn’t do. But psychologist Saul Kassin says that’s a myth. This week, we bring you a favorite 2022 episode about why we sometimes act against our own self-interest — even when the stakes are at their highest.
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- [00:00]
Shankar Vedantam
This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. There is a reasonable assumption we make as we go through life. Groups act in their own self interest. Merchants sell things in order to make money. Employers want to hire the best employees. Sports teams want to win matches. The assumption of self interest is also the lens through which we understand how individuals behave. We can see why someone might lie on a resume in order to get ahead. We also know that no one would lie on their resume to make themselves look worse. When people are accused of wrongdoing, it makes perfect sense that the guilty would claim to be innocent. But every ounce of common sense tells us no innocent person would ever confess to doing something wrong.
- [00:56]
Saul Kassin
We understand as a matter of common sense and intuition that people behave in ways that favor their self interest. How in God's name does that favor your self interest?
- [01:07]
Shankar Vedantam
How and why people come to betray their self interest? This week on Hidden Brain. Support for Hidden Brain comes from adt. From ADT comes Trusted Neighbor, the new standard in home access through the ADT app. Easily grant and automate event based or scheduled access for planned guests without interrupting your day. And notify trusted individuals of events like alarms or packages. Visit ADT.com when every second counts. Count on ADT requires ADT complete promonitoring plan and compatible devices. Copyright 2025 ADT, LLC. All rights reserved. In the sixth grade, Saul Kassen received an assignment from his teacher to write a book report. It took him about a nanosecond to decide to write about his hero, Mickey Mantle.
- [02:10]
Saul Kassin
I was a huge Yankees fan and I wanted to do a really good job.
- [02:16]
Shankar Vedantam
The baseball star was not the only object of Saul's affections. His sixth grade teacher was up on a pedestal, too.
- [02:23]
Saul Kassin
I loved Mrs. Avery. I had a crush, to be honest, on Mrs. Avery. I wanted to impress Mrs. Avery, and so I spent a lot of time on this book report. I just remember being excited to get the grade back. I thought it was a really good paper. I'd spent a lot of time on it and when she called me up, she would call people and they'd come up and get their paper. This was toward the end of the school day and I just remember her glaring at me in such a way that I looked at the. At the grade and there was, with a circle around it, a big red F. I said, I don't understand. And she says, well, you plagiarized it.
- [03:03]
Shankar Vedantam
Saul found himself dumbfounded. He loved Mrs. Avery and he loved Mickey Mantle, and he had poured his heart and soul into the book report.
- [03:12]
Saul Kassin
I didn't want to break out into tears in front of my classmates and in front of her. So I held it together. I got home, flicked open the door. There was my mother, and I burst out crying. Mrs. Avery accused me of cheating. She didn't ask me if I plagiarized. She told me that I did. And I just will never forget the helplessness that I felt at having been accused of something I didn't do and not really knowing how to respond in a way, to defend myself.
- [03:45]
Shankar Vedantam
It was Saul's mother who finally obtained justice. She demanded proof from Mrs. Avery that the book report was plagiarized. Mrs. Avery looked for evidence, but couldn't find any. So she changed Saul's grade. But the moment of helplessness stayed with Saul. Why had he been unable to speak up? Saul grew up to become a psychologist. His area of study how people interpret the actions of others. He was especially fascinated by juries. Here were people whose conclusions about defendants had life and death stakes. To evaluate the psychological factors that shape how juries think, Saul came up with cases where some jurors might feel a defendant was guilty, while others might feel a he was innocent. Saul figured ambiguous cases would shed light on how people make up their minds about guilt and innocence. He started running experiments with volunteers playing the role of jurors. He noticed there were some cases where his volunteers were totally unanimous.
- [04:52]
Saul Kassin
A couple of cases came back that elicited no variability. As far as everybody was concerned, everybody was guilty. Fortunately, we also asked subjects in those studies to explain their verdict. What was the basis for your verdict? And in the cases that I recall, everybody cited a confession.
- [05:11]
Shankar Vedantam
A confession. When a defendant in a criminal case admitted he had done something wrong. Volunteers playing the role of jurors saw these as open and shut cases. Someone says they're guilty, they're obviously guilty.
- [05:28]
Saul Kassin
My first response was, well, that's interesting. It looks like we'll have to remove confessions from evidence in order to use cases.
- [05:36]
Shankar Vedantam
Saul wanted cases where volunteers disagreed with each other. Cases involving confessions where everyone agreed with everyone else were useless.
- [05:45]
Saul Kassin
It became a nuisance variable. So right away, we tossed out cases involving confessions because confessions were a nuisance.
- [05:56]
Shankar Vedantam
It happens so often in science as well as in life. We fail to notice something important because we are so intent on something else. It took Saul a while to realize his nuisance was telling him something important. As he continued to study juries, Saul decided he needed to better understand how police procured evidence in criminal trials. He decided to audit a law school class on evidence.
- [06:26]
Saul Kassin
I got the Casebook. I did all the reading, and there was a footnote in that casebook in which they referenced an interrogation manual, the most popular interrogation manual. So I thought, wow, how interesting to see what they're doing to interrogate. And so I went to the library and pulled out that edition of that manual and I read the book.
- [06:49]
Unknown
What kind of techniques were in this manual? Sol Just one or two examples.
- [06:53]
Saul Kassin
Well, for starters, the opening salvo of an interrogation was to bring in a suspect and declare an accusation of guilt.
- [07:03]
Shankar Vedantam
This, of course, is exactly what Mrs. Avery had done in the sixth grade.
- [07:08]
Saul Kassin
We know you did this. Don't lie. In fact, I believe in that first manual, they advised the interrogator to come in with a folder full of materials and toss it on the table and said, we, we've got a lot of evidence against you. And they suggested doing that even if you didn't have a whole lot of evidence. So right out of the gate, I'm looking and I'm saying, okay, wow, these are powerful tactics. These are almost Milgram esque.
- [07:35]
Shankar Vedantam
In the early 1960s, Stanley Milgram conducted a series of experiments on blind obedience. He tested if volunteers would comply with instructions from an authority figure. The most famous experiment featured an experimenter who demanded that a volunteer subject someone else to painful electric shocks. In reality, no one received shocks. The experiment was designed to test if volunteers were willing to go along with crazy instructions. If the volunteer resisted, the experimenter had a series of verbal prods to keep the experiment going.
- [08:14]
Saul Kassin
It's absolutely essential that you continue. You have no other choice, teacher. You must continue. The experiment requires that you continue. And the prods are designed to get a subject to first administer a 15 volt shock and then a 30 volt shock and in 15 volt increments to bring that subject up to the point where they would be asked to administer a 450 volt shock, which on Milgram's shock machine was listed as XXX severe shock. Answer is woman.
- [08:49]
Unknown
450 volts.
- [08:51]
Saul Kassin
When you look at this paradigm, you go, nobody's gonna do that.
- [08:55]
Unknown
Well, I'm not going on.
- [08:56]
Shankar Vedantam
If he refuses to do it, the.
- [08:58]
Unknown
Experiment requires that you go on.
- [08:59]
Saul Kassin
Teacher. 65% of subjects go all the way up the shock scale to 450 volts. That's Milgram. Now I look at the interrogation manual. You bring them in isolated, no friends or family members or lawyers present. There is, instead of an experimenter as an authority figure, a police detective who has real authority. And that police detective aims to accuse you of something and get you to make an admission of guilt. And through a process of gradual escalation and a series of prods that are listed, the detective's goal is to get you to make a small confession or an admission of I was there, and then a slightly greater admission I saw what happened, and then a slightly greater admission I was minimally involved and eventually 15 volts at a time. The goal is to get that person to make a full admission of guilt coupled by a full narrative confession that explains the chronology and the story. The authority figure in Milgram's obedience experiment is a psychology experimenter wearing a white lab coat who has no real authority and no real power over those subjects. If an authority figure like a psych experimenter can produce that level of obedience, can you imagine what a detective who has power over your fate and future might be able to produce? And that's what unnerved me. I kept thinking, geez, if they bring innocent people into this situation, they're going to get some Milgram like results.
- [10:51]
Shankar Vedantam
Saul realized he was confronting two powerful facts. Fact number one, juries believe people when they offer confessions. Fact number two, police are taught to extract confessions from people using a series of powerful psychological techniques. You don't have to assume bad intent on the part of detectives for this to be a problem. Like the rest of us, detectives assume no one who is innocent will admit to being guilty. Saul decided to look more closely at the science of confessions. Only he found there was no science of confessions. When someone says they did something wrong, it seems so self evidently obvious that they did do something wrong, that no one had really studied it. Saul did find one early example though, A case study described in the early 20th century by a psychologist named Hugo Munsterberg.
- [11:57]
Saul Kassin
Munsterberg has a chapter titled Untrue Confessions, and in it he describes this case out of Chicago, the murder of Bessie Hollister. What was interesting and what I think made him skeptical about the confession was first of all, the suspect whom confessed had limited cognitive abilities and was a vulnerable person to issue as a suspect. He then realized that they then brought him in for hours of interrogation in which it was described that he embellished his story from one telling to another. Turns out he provided some details in that story, and it turns out that some of those details were false. And so we have a situation where he was interrogated for long periods of time. He was a vulnerable suspect, and the confession he gave was not particularly accurate in relation to the case facts. And yet the prosecutor pushed forward and within, I kid you not, one week, he was Convicted, and shortly thereafter, he was hung.
- [13:03]
Shankar Vedantam
Saul started looking for other cases of untrue confessions in the history books. He found quite a few. Eventually he came up with a classification system. The first kind were voluntary false confessions. Like the time in 1932 when a famous aviator's son was kidnapped.
- [13:23]
Saul Kassin
Charles Lindbergh was at the time an American hero, and his infant son was kidnapped. And it was big news, as you can imagine. And 200 people volunteered confessions to that kidnapping. And ultimately police did not charge any of them. Ultimately, none of them had anything to do with it. It's interesting to some extent ironic that when someone volunteers a confession, police are inherently suspicious and they look for proof of guilt to corroborate that voluntary confession. So they might ask, for example, for facts. Okay, you say you committed this crime, Tell me about the case. Facts describe the crime scene to me, or lead me to the weapon, or lead me to the victim. And invariably innocent, voluntary false confessors can't do it. Voluntary false confessions are cases in which innocent people, without any external pressure from police, step forward and confess to crimes they didn't commit. Sometimes they're protecting somebody else. It might be a child covering for a parent or a parent covering for a child. So sometimes it's a sort of a rational reason like that, and sometimes it's a reason that reeks of pathology and somebody needing to gain attention. The motives may vary, but it is my sense that voluntary false confessions don't present much of a problem for the criminal justice system.
- [15:00]
Shankar Vedantam
So a second kind of false confession is something that you've termed compliant confessions. And as you started to look at the historical record, you find quite a few examples of this, sometimes going back decades or even centuries. You tell the story about events that took place in the 17th century, for example, in Salem.
- [15:19]
Saul Kassin
Yeah, the Salem witch trials are a great example. Compliant false confessions. These are cases where somebody is under great amounts of stress, they are motivated to put an end to that stress. They want out of that bad situation. They're not even thinking about long term consequences. They may have come to believe it's in their better interest to confess than to deny involvement. They know they're innocent, but they confess anyway as a way to get out of a bad situation. Those types of cases go back throughout history.
- [15:57]
Shankar Vedantam
In the Salem witch trials, some suspects who failed to confess were executed. Given the choice between making a false confession and being put to death, many chose to lie about their guilt. Of course, the Salem Witch trials took place over 300 years ago. The same thing couldn't happen today. Could it? Could it?
- [16:21]
Saul Kassin
You know, I was teaching at Williams College. It's a liberal arts college in Massachusetts.
- [16:26]
Shankar Vedantam
It was 2002 and I was preparing.
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Saul Kassin
For classes in the fall and this producer called and said, I wonder if you can look at some confessions for us. I said, okay, what's the case? And she said, we promised not to mention this to anyone. I said, sure, it's confidential. And she said, it's the Central Park Jogger. And I went silent.
- [16:52]
Shankar Vedantam
When we come back, the story of the Central Park Jogger. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantan. Support for Hidden brain comes from LinkedIn. As a small business owner, you don't have the luxury of clocking out early. So when you're hiring, you need a partner that works just as hard as you do. That hiring partner is LinkedIn jobs. They make it easy to post your job for free, share it with your network and get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place. LinkedIn's new feature helps you write job descriptions and quickly reach the right candidates with detailed insights. At the end of the day, the most important thing to your small business is the quality of candidates. And with LinkedIn you can feel confident that you're getting the best. Post your job for free@LinkedIn.com that's LinkedIn.com HB to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. A quick word before we start this next segment. We're going to be discussing two violent crimes that psychologist Saul Kassen has studied. These cases include graphic accounts of murder and rape. Around 9pm one evening in April 1989, a 28 year old woman was attacked while taking a run in Central park in New York. She was beaten, raped and left for dead. Around 1:30am she was found unconscious by two passersby. She was rushed to the hospital where she remained in a coma for 12 days. Psychologist Saul Kassad remembers the news stories about the horrific crime.
- [19:01]
Saul Kassin
For a city that was already on edge, this was the breaking point. The papers were just filled with headlines that, you know, we got to solve this. I understand fully that when this happened and when it was reported and the heinousness of the crime, the city was in a state of outrage and demanding that we find who did this. Within 72 hours, NYPD solved the case. There were a number of kids running through the park that night wreaking havoc on some bystanders. And police immediately started rounding people up going into their neighborhoods. Bringing others in. They interrogated all sorts of kids and ultimately found five kids who confessed. 14, 15, 16 years old.
- [19:50]
Shankar Vedantam
All were black or Latino. Police questioned them for hours and got their confessions, including four on videotape.
- [19:59]
Saul Kassin
The way New York City worked their confessions in those days, starting in the 1970s, 1980s, was the detectives interrogated off camera. They brought their suspect to a point where they were ready to confess, and then they delivered them to an assistant district attorney who stepped in with a camera on and took the confession.
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Unknown
Would you please tell us what your full name is?
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Antron Lamont McCray McCrae.
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Could you please state your full name?
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Carrie Jamel Pointe Wise. Hey.
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Would you please sit up and tell me what your name is?
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My name is Raymond Santa.
- [20:40]
Shankar Vedantam
I'm sorry you have to speak as a letter, Raymond.
- [20:42]
Unknown
Ms. Santana.
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And how old are you?
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Fourteen.
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Saul Kassin
They described the jogger as she was running. They described her location. They described dragging her down through the grass. There were clear tread marks. And they gave a description of a woman who had been beaten in the head with a hard object, clothes pulled off and left for dead.
- [21:07]
Unknown
And you just left her laying in the bushes?
- [21:09]
Saul Kassin
Yes.
- [21:10]
Unknown
Did you try to hide her so she wouldn't get found?
- [21:13]
No, I ain't trying to hide her. They, they, they put some.
- [21:17]
Saul Kassin
You cannot look past those statements on video. They got some of the facts right. They're basically telling the same story. There are some annoying disparities and contradictions between them, but they get enough facts right.
- [21:36]
Shankar Vedantam
None of the boys had attorneys present in the video confession of 16 year old Corey Weiss. He's sitting in what looks like a classroom. It's past midnight. His knees are shaking with nervous energy. A prosecutor grills him with questions.
- [21:52]
Unknown
What's your last name, please?
- [21:54]
Saul Kassin
Weiss.
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Unknown
And how old are you?
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16.
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Do you go to school?
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Yes, ma'am.
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Where do you go to school?
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Lebron Stevenson High School.
- [22:05]
And what grade are you in there?
- [22:07]
Saul Kassin
He said he was involved in the rape. He was present and he played a minimal role. I believe he said he had held her legs while someone else pulled her pants down.
- [22:17]
Unknown
I wasn't doing as much as they was doing.
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Were you going up to her crotch?
- [22:21]
No. I was about to. I said no. I could see the expression on her face. That and I felt kind of bad. This is my first treatment I did to any type of female in the street.
- [22:35]
Saul Kassin
When you hear a statement like that, he not only describes what happened, but then describes his own expression of remorse. I'm sorry I did this. He basically said, this is my first Rape. It's gonna be my last.
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Unknown
This is my first rape. I never did this before in the school. My last time doing it. This is my first experience. This will be my last. So they did that.
- [23:04]
Saul Kassin
Here's a confession that's not just communicating an admission of guilt and some narrative details that are accurate in relation to the crime facts. But now he's reflecting on his own motivation and remorse and acceptance of responsibility. How does a judge and a jury look past that statement? And when you have four of them, even though they don't align with each other perfectly, how can a jury look past those four statements?
- [23:42]
Shankar Vedantam
All five teenagers were convicted. For several years, most everyone thought they were guilty. The convictions continued to gnaw at Saul, however. And then one day he got a call from ABC News. The producer said ABC had received a tip that the teenager's confessions were made up.
- [24:02]
Saul Kassin
And so they sent me two big Xerox type boxes. And I spent the next couple of weeks probably doing terrible teaching at Williams because I was completely distracted by this case. And when I was done, I was horrified. There was no evidence of their guilt. The confessions were contradictory.
- [24:24]
Shankar Vedantam
What were some of the details, if.
- [24:25]
Unknown
You remember it, that actually were at odds with one another? And this is the complicated thing because sometimes, of course, you have three eyewitnesses at a scene of anything that happens, a traffic crash. They in fact, are not going to agree. In fact, there's a wealth of psychological studies that show that they will not agree on all of the details. And in fact, they might come up with important discrepancies. And in some ways it's suspicious if five people at the scene of a traffic crash describe it perfectly.
- [24:49]
Saul Kassin
Yes.
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Unknown
So there's a part of you that thinks some of these discrepancies might actually be because people forget memory is fallible. So it's actually not surprising that some things might clash with one another.
- [24:59]
Saul Kassin
Yes. And I think that's what everyone was thinking. I didn't know this in 1989, but I learned in 2002 that detectives showed Corey Wise pictures of the victim. So he was able to describe her. He was taken to the crime scene. He gave a vivid description of the crime scene. They all did. Turns out two of them were taken to the crime scene. Now that's contaminating their memories. That's. Now this is not their statement. You've motivated and incentivized them because they think it's in their best interest to cooperate. And you've spoon fed them information to provide a compelling, accurate confession. But you're Right. Nobody expected a full alignment of all the facts. And that's why I think the judges and juries, they were convicted at two different trials, were able to look past those discrepancies.
- [25:52]
Shankar Vedantam
The judges and jurors in the trials behaved exactly like the volunteers in Saul's early jury experiments. The suspects had confessed, case closed. It didn't matter that there was compelling evidence pointing in another direction.
- [26:08]
Saul Kassin
There were several semen samples taken, sent to the FBI lab that summer. The results came back first. All of those samples taken traced back to one person. They all match each other. That person was not one of those five confessors. The judge knew it. The juries knew it. We have two juries in which they are told that they confessed on the one hand, but they're excluded by the DNA on the other. And as one of the jurors said in an interview years later, they had a confession. And if there's a confession, what else is the need to know?
- [26:46]
Shankar Vedantam
ABC News contacted Saul because a previously convicted criminal had come forward to claim responsibility for the crime. A serial rapist named Matias Reyes said he was the one who had attacked the Central park jogger. The samples taken from the crime scene matched his DNA.
- [27:05]
Saul Kassin
In December of 2002, their convictions were overturned. The DA's office filed a motion to overturn the convictions, and the judge agreed with that motion. And so there were convictions overturned.
- [27:22]
Unknown
The city eventually paid the boys $41 million for the mistake and for the suffering that they had inflicted on them. But what exactly happened during those confessions, Saul? Do we know what happened that prompted the kids to basically make the confessions they did?
- [27:38]
Saul Kassin
Well, we know what the kids say happened. The kids were in the interrogation rooms for a range of 14 to 30 hours. The kids say they were threatened, that promises were made. They believed that by minimizing their involvement. Each one I mentioned, nobody confessed to the rape. Each one said I played a subsidiary, minor role. Each one, upon confession, was arrested, and each one was surprised. They thought they were going home. It means they were led to believe that. That we think the role you played is no big deal. So cooperate with us and everything will be okay. And hence they were surprised that they were put under arrest. I don't know what happened. I know that they claimed they felt physically threatened. They claimed threats and promises were made. Detectives deny it. I have no idea what happened behind the scenes, but I do know that their confessions were false and that each one minimized their role in a way that would make some sense. That's not unique to the jogger case, you see it all over the place.
- [28:48]
Unknown
So we've looked in some ways at the strange phenomenon where some people will step forward voluntarily to say that they have committed a crime when they haven't. And perhaps they're looking for attention, perhaps they're psychologically disturbed. And we've looked at cases where people might come forward and confess, perhaps because they feel under pressure or they feel that this is a way that they can go home and see their families. You also talk in some ways about a more complicated psychological dimension of false confession where these confessions are actually internalized. Talk about this idea that in some ways this might be the most difficult idea to absorb, where someone actually comes to believe that they have committed a crime.
- [29:30]
Saul Kassin
Yes, it was difficult to me. I didn't know what I was seeing the first time I saw it. There was a case in the 1970s in which a 17 year old boy named Peter Riley in Canaan, Connecticut came home and found his mother in a pool of blood, having been beaten to death and stabbed. And Riley's confession was fascinating because first of all, he adamantly denied having anything to do with this. He had no history, no background, no conflict with his mother. He wasn't a violent person, but he confessed. And why did he confess? Because after hours and hours and hours of interrogation, the detective offered him a polygraph exam, a lie detector test. Peter, you say you didn't do this. We think otherwise. We have evidence. Are you willing to take a lie detector test? Trusting in the lie detector test, then trusting in his own innocence, Peter said, yes, I would. At which point they administered a test and lied about the results. They said, peter, you failed the test. And he said, that's not possible. And they said, well, it is possible. You failed the test. It shows deception. And sometimes the test tells us things about you or person that even they don't know about themselves. So it looks like you killed your mother, even if you don't remember it. Now, Peter's in this quandary. On the one hand, they're claiming to have unimpeachable medical. Sometimes the polygraph is referred to as medical evidence, sometimes it's referred to as scientific evidence. But it's objective and it can tell us things about you and your behavior that even you don't recall. So Peter, on the one hand, has this unimpeachable evidence presented to him. Now he's 17 and God knows what his mental and emotional state is at this time. His mother is his only surviving relative. And he grows up trusting police. And like most Americans, doesn't know that they're allowed to lie about evidence. So Peter is trying to reconcile. On the one hand, they say that I failed a lie detector test, and on the other hand, I don't remember it that way. And they presented him with some options. You know, sometimes that happens. People block unpleasant memories or people lose consciousness. And they gave him a way to bridge this gap between their unimpeachable evidence and his lack of memory. And so they convinced him that he must have done it. He transitions from this state of denial to, well, it looks like I did it. When you hear these cases, often, the first utterances are things like, I must have done it. It looks like I did it. It appears that I did it. They're not saying, oh, yeah, now I remember. They're concluding, they're inferring that they must have done it, because, after all, you have this evidence. And then he transitions from that tentative hypothetical language of inference into a full blown, oh, my God, I killed my mother. I pulled out a knife and I stabbed her. And that was his confession. He was immediately arrested, and he was convicted. And a year and a half or so later, a new DA came into the office, looked through the case files, realized that Riley was elsewhere at the time of death. It couldn't have been him, and vacated his conviction, and he was never retried again. That's the first time I'd seen, and I didn't know how to define it at the time, what turned out to be what we called internalization. I couldn't tell how momentary it was, how long it lasted, but it was clear that at some point, for some period of time, he came to believe in his own guilt.
- [33:43]
Shankar Vedantam
So the police basically have arrested someone. They prosecuted the person, they found the person guilty. A new DA comes in and basically says, the person's not guilty. Now there's still someone who's been murdered, Someone who's been killed.
- [33:57]
Saul Kassin
Yes.
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Shankar Vedantam
What did the cops do in this case?
- [34:00]
Saul Kassin
They did nothing. They did not pursue these alternative suspects. There was good reason to believe that they had other suspects, not saying they were the perpetrators, but certainly people worthy of investigation. And that did not happen. I've gotten to know Peter and a number of other exonerees who are frustrated that police didn't go back and reinvestigate the case and find out who killed their mother, their father, or both.
- [34:31]
Unknown
I mean, some people might look at your work and say, you know, Saul Kassen spends a lot of time trying to get people who are in prison out of prison. But there's another way to look at what you're doing, which is also to say the fact that we've put the wrong person in prison, yes, that's a tragedy for that wrong person for Peter. But it's also a tragedy for society because the real killer has not been brought to justice.
- [34:55]
Saul Kassin
Not only has the not killer been brought to justice, but here's what the statistics show in the Innocence Project. Cases where DNA excludes the wrongfully convicted and sometimes that DNA hits on a perpetrator. Many of those cases, that perpetrator went on to commit one or more multiple violent offenses, including homicides and sexual assaults. When you get a confession from an innocent person and close that case, you're not doing a whole lot of good for public safety.
- [35:32]
Shankar Vedantam
When we come back, what happens in our minds when we are induced to make false confessions and the use of police police interrogation tactics in workplaces and private organizations. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. So many TV crime shows center on detectives who have an uncanny ability to spot the right suspect. But psychologist Saul Kassin has found that the confidence police have in their hunches is mostly unfounded. He once ran an experiment where he asked prison inmates to confess to two crimes, one they had committed and one they had not committed. How good were laypeople and police detectives in telling truth from fiction?
- [36:30]
Saul Kassin
Bottom line was the average accuracy rate was was 54%. Truth and lie detection studies give us on average, when you meta analyze all of the studies, they give us an average accuracy rate of 54%. It's exactly what we found.
- [36:45]
Shankar Vedantam
In other words, we would do about as well in telling apart truth from lies if we flipped a coin. But that's not all. In the study, police were actually worse than college students at detecting deception.
- [36:59]
Saul Kassin
We found that our student observers were more accurate than our police observers in part because the police observers kept over believing the false confessions. And we found that the police observers were a whole lot more confident than our student observers. They were not accurate and they were confident. Not a good combination. Wrongful convictions archives are filled with those mistakes. We simply confirmed that. Now in the laboratory.
- [37:32]
Shankar Vedantam
Saul and other researchers have also examined a number of psychological factors that cause suspects to make false confessions. Some people seem to be more suggestible. This line of research was developed by a former cop turned psychologist, Gisli Goodjohnson.
- [37:49]
Saul Kassin
He was a police officer in Iceland, eventually left the force and got a degree in clinical psychology. He had taken Much to his dismay, a false confession in a case and became interested in suggestibility effects.
- [38:06]
Shankar Vedantam
Gislige Gudjohnson came up with experiments that mimicked aspects of police interrogations. He'd give volunteers a story and then ask them to recall it.
- [38:16]
Saul Kassin
And then he would say, I'm going to ask you a series of questions. And he would ask questions, many of which were leading and suggestive of information that was not in the story. And he measured how many of those questions do people then insert into their memory.
- [38:33]
Shankar Vedantam
When volunteers recall something correctly, he would also sometimes tell them they were wrong.
- [38:38]
Saul Kassin
He would say, nope, that's not right. You gotta do this again. Eventually, he became interested in both types of suggestibility. Can we cause people to change their memory by presenting misinformation embedded in questions? And then can we cause people to change their memory by giving them negative feedback?
- [39:01]
Shankar Vedantam
The answer to both questions was yes. The studies found that some people were more suggestible than others. Children, for example, were easier to manipulate than adults. When interrogators ask leading questions, they may unintentionally change the memories of suspects and eyewitnesses. When detectives reject what a suspect or eyewitness says, they may think they are merely testing the veracity of the statements. But they might also be causing some people to develop inaccurate memories. We think that asking questions is a neutral activity. But in fact, the questions you ask can shape the answers you get. Another factor in false confessions, Saul cites a study by the psychologist Leonard Bickman, who found that when a stranger wearing a uniform barked instructions at people on the street, they meekly followed those instructions.
- [39:58]
Saul Kassin
And he found that people obeyed that order at high levels, this arbitrary order from a stranger when they were wearing a uniform at high levels. And it just goes to show something about blind obedience.
- [40:15]
Shankar Vedantam
One of the other ideas that you.
- [40:16]
Unknown
Explore is that we are really dependent on social support.
- [40:20]
Shankar Vedantam
Can you talk about the idea that.
- [40:22]
Unknown
One of the ways in which many interrogations are constructed is to deprive us of these social supports, and these social supports, in fact, are integral to. To our maintaining our ability to function psychologically?
- [40:35]
Saul Kassin
Yes, it is. The opening predicate of a police interrogation is to isolate the subject, bring them in, and put them in a room alone in our station, and no friends, no family members, no phones, preferably in a soundproof room where they can't hear voices and phones out there so that they're feeling isolated and alone. My God. Social psychologists, health psychologists, know that people need people, and that that need to belong and that need to affiliate especially, is true under Stress. And that when people have social support present, they're able to tolerate more pain. Physiologically, they show levels of relaxation while under stress. It's important for people to have that. And yet, when you look at what happens in the interrogation room, the first thing is you are isolated and you are away from the people you know. The other thing they don't get in an interrogation, police are characterizing the crime, they're characterizing the evidence. They may be lying about the evidence. If you're alone in the room, you have no external checks on that reality. You can't turn to someone else and say, is that true? Do you know if that's true? And so you're not getting additional information. So you're lacking both the support that comes with people and the additional information that comes with people.
- [42:04]
Shankar Vedantam
Could you talk a moment about the.
- [42:05]
Unknown
Role that sleep plays in false confessions? Saul, you cite some really amazing statistics on the likelihood of false confessions. The longer a suspect is kept awake.
- [42:17]
Saul Kassin
The average interrogation lasts about an hour or two. Pretty much captures 90 some percent of interrogations when you look at the archives of wrongful convictions, where time records are kept. And I emphasize that because oftentimes records are not kept. The length of interrogation is 6 hours, 8 hours, 10 hours, 12 hours, an average of 16 hours, sometimes up to 24. And more false confessions happen over time. Partly that is a function of sleep deprivation and deprivation of other need states. But there are no time limits set on an interrogation in the United States. And what happens over time is a person becomes deprived of food, sleep, sometimes bathroom breaks. Certainly they are deprived of social support, as we talked about earlier, which is in some ways as fundamental a need as anything else. And so what you find is that one proxy for a false confession. If you show me a confession that lasted the interrogation that lasted 16 hours, right away, I say that person was at some level of risk for that alone.
- [43:30]
Shankar Vedantam
Saul has come up with a number of experiments to see if he can induce false confessions in volunteers using only the kind of tricks and mild pressure that would be approved by university ethics committees. In one study, he asked subjects to come into his lab and complete a task on a computer.
- [43:48]
Saul Kassin
Then the experimenter turns and says, turns to the subject, before you start typing, I should warn you, there's a problem with the hardware in this computer. Whatever you do, don't hit the alt key. If you hit the alt key, we may lose all our data. The computer will crash. So whatever you do, don't hit the alt key. Subject says, I get it. About a minute or Two in. The experimenter erupts and says, oh my God, what just happened? Looks across the table at the subject and says, did you hit the alt key? Subject says, nope, I never touched it.
- [44:25]
Shankar Vedantam
The experimenter insists on a confession. Here is where the experimental manipulation comes in. There is another person sitting in the room with a volunteer. This person appears to be another volunteer, but is really a confederate working for Saul. For some volunteers selected at random, this person now pipes up and tells the volunteer, I saw you hit the alt key.
- [44:50]
Saul Kassin
So what happened was that in the presence of false evidence, when the confederates said, I saw him or her hit that key, we got a substantial increase in the number of people who then falsely confessed and agreed to sign the paper to hitting the alt key. Some sub number of them also then internalized the belief.
- [45:13]
Shankar Vedantam
If this experiment showed how false evidence can produce false confessions, Saul has also studied the reverse. He's looked at how false confessions can taint the evidence. In one study, Saul had a volunteer sit in a room with another person. Again, the second person was a confederate secretly working for Saul. The two people were divided by a screen. They could hear each other breathing and moving around. All of a sudden, the experimenter entered the room in a huff and declared that money had been stolen from an adjacent room. She separated the two people and asked the volunteer in a one on one conversation if the other person had ever left the room.
- [45:54]
Saul Kassin
Was she here the whole time? 90 some percent of the time they said, yeah, she was here the whole time. I would have seen her, heard her go out, you know, we were chatting away.
- [46:03]
Shankar Vedantam
The experimenter accepted this and left. Then she came back a short while later and said the other person had confessed to leaving the room and taking the money. The experimenter asked the volunteer again, are.
- [46:16]
Saul Kassin
You sure she was here the whole time? And the subject now drops from being absolutely certain that this other person never left the room to I'm not so sure anymore. Now more than 50% of them cannot vouch for her presence in the room with them, even though she was there breathing at the other side of this wall. They could no longer vouch for her presence because they heard that she had confessed. And they didn't even get to see or read a compelling confession. They were simply given a. A secondhand account of the fact that she confessed. And that's what we've seen in actual cases. Once a false confession is out of the bag, it corrupts everything around, corrupts eyewitnesses, it corrupts alibis, it corrupts informants, it corrupts believe it or not. Forensic examiners, forensic science examiners. When you look at wrongful convictions in the Innocence Project involving confessions, almost 80% of them contained one or more other errors in evidence. And almost invariably those other errors came after the confession.
- [47:27]
Shankar Vedantam
Disturbingly, Saul has found that private companies are taking a leaf out of the police interrogation manual. Take the case of Joaquin Robles.
- [47:38]
Saul Kassin
He worked for autozone. He'd been there for a year. He was aspiring to become a manager. And one of the tasks he had was he would take money from the store and when the bank truck came, he would deliver the money to the truck. And one day $820 showed up missing. And the AutoZone had a loss prevention manager. Loss prevention managers are folks in charge of a retail outfit or, you know, whether it's Macy's or Walmart or autozone, and they're empowered to try and recover the loss from theft of money and merchandise. So in the middle of his workday, he was called in by the loss prevention manager and interrogated. So you know what? $820 is missing. It looks like you did. It looks like you took the money. And Robles. I didn't do that, and I wouldn't do it.
- [48:30]
Shankar Vedantam
The AutoZone loss prevention manager interrogated Robles for hours and then threatened to call the police.
- [48:37]
Saul Kassin
And Robles looked at the choices and he said, well, I don't really want to involve police. What do I have to do? And he wrote a confession dictated to him, in which he said, I took the $820. We had family debts to clear. I'm sorry. And he signs his name, and then he signs a promissory note in which he's agreeing to have that money deducted from his paychecks to compensate AutoZone. He signs it, the money is deducted, and he is promptly terminated. A couple of weeks later, turns out that the $820 was not lost. It was a clerical error, and no money was stolen. But it was too late. He'd already been terminated. His reputation had been tarnished. When Robles was asked, why did you agree to sign the confession and give the money? He said, quite simply, it was worth $820 to keep my job. He figured he was going to keep a job, and so he signed the confession.
- [49:48]
Unknown
What would you recommend in terms of ways to limit this, both in the criminal justice system as well as in corporations? You know, it also seems impractical to basically suggest that police can never use pressure or a manager can never make an employee feel uncomfortable if in fact something horrendous has happened. What are your solutions to the problems of false confession, Saul?
- [50:12]
Saul Kassin
Well, for starters, those sessions should be fully recorded so that you and I and a prosecutor and a judge and a jury can watch it later and understand for ourselves how that came about. Two, it's not a question of the pressure that is felt. Some of the most benign interrogators, investigative interviewers in Europe, for example, they apply pressure to suspects. But here's the important part. They ask open ended questions. They don't communicate information about the crime. You know, when I get a confession to look at, I'd like to know that all of the facts in that confession originated with the confessor. And then I can evaluate were those facts accurate, were those facts not accurate? These are evidence based techniques and that's the goal right now.
- [51:08]
Shankar Vedantam
I mean, I think what I'm hearing.
- [51:09]
Unknown
From you, Saul, is really the importance of having investigators and police in some ways think a little more like scientists. Which is when you're a scientist and you have a hypothesis, yes, you want the hypothesis to be true. But there are also the scientific method teaches you how to be skeptical of your own hypothesis. And in fact, it goes to some lengths to try and prove your own hypothesis wrong. And this is of course difficult and painful to do because we're often successful in proving our hypotheses wrong. But in some ways, I think that's what I'm hearing you saying, which is that if you start with a very strong hypothesis and you start with a belief in your own infallibility, it becomes very hard to exercise the skepticism. To say I could be wrong.
- [51:49]
Saul Kassin
I couldn't have put it better. You're absolutely right.
- [51:59]
Shankar Vedantam
Saul Kassen is a psychologist at the.
- [52:01]
Unknown
John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
- [52:03]
Shankar Vedantam
He's the author of why Innocent People Confess and why We Believe Their Confessions. Saul, thank you for joining me today on Hidden Brain.
- [52:11]
Saul Kassin
Shaka. You are very, very welcome. It's a pleasure.
- [52:20]
Shankar Vedantam
Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy, Paul Kristen Wong, Laura Kwerel, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. If you love Hidden Brain and want more of our work, please consider signing up for our podcast subscription, Hidden Brain Plus. Your subscription provides vital support that helps us bring you more episodes of the show. It also gives you access to a catalog of bonus conversations that you cannot find anywhere else. You can try Hidden Brain plus with a free seven day trial by going to support support.hiddenbrain.org or Apple Co HiddenBrain if you use Apple Podcasts, those sites again are support.hiddenbrain.org and Apple Co HiddenBrain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.
- [53:28]
Saul Kassin
Sa.