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9 Psych., Crime & L. 1 (2003)

handle is hein.journals/pcyceadl9 and id is 1 raw text is: Psychology, Crime & Law, 2003, Vol. 9, pp. 1-8 RZ Ro=tI d INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES AND FALSE CONFESSIONS: A CONCEPTUAL REPLICATION OF KASSIN AND KIECHEL (1996) ROBERT HORSELENBERG*, HARALD MERCKELBACH and SARAH JOSEPHS Department of Experimental Psychology and Faculty of Law, Maastricht University, PO. Box 616, 6200 MD, Maastricht, The Netherlands (Received 26 February 2001; In final form 9 May 2001) In their study, Kassin and Kiechel (1996) falsely accused students of causing a computer crash and found that 69% of them were willing to sign a false confession, 28% internalized guilt, and 9% confabulated details to support their false beliefs. The authors interpreted these results to mean that false confessions can be easily elicited. However, in their study, false confessions were explicitly not associated with negative consequences. The current study examined whether false incriminating evidence may elicit false confessions in undergraduate students when such confessions are explicitly associated with financial loss. We also explored whether individual differences in compliance, suggestibility, fantasy-proneness, dissociation, and cognitive failures are related to false confessions. The large majority of participants (82%) were willing to sign a false confession. In about half of the participants, false confessions were accompanied by internalization and confabulation. There was no evidence that individual differences modulate participants' susceptibility to false confessions. Taken together, our study replicates previous findings of Kassin and Kiechel. INTRODUCTION Although confession evidence plays an important role in criminal proceedings, this topic has received relatively little attention from experimental psychologists (Kassin, 1997). Mean- while, especially false confessions warrant systematic study because, as a number of well documented case studies show (e.g., Wright, 1994; Gudjonsson, Kopelman and MacKeith, 1999), their legal ramifications might be far-reaching. Research about the inci- dence of self-reported false confessions among prison inmates has yielded estimates that vary from 0.6% (Cassell, 1998) to 12% (Gudjonsson and Sigurdsson, 1994). Yet, little is known about the precise situational and interpersonal antecedents of such confessions. Several authors (Kassin and Wrightsman, 1985; Kassin, 1997; McCann, 1998; Wakefield and Underwager, 1998) have pointed that there are at least three distinct types of false confessions. The first type is the voluntary false confession that involves spontaneous self- incriminating statements made without external pressure. The second type is the coerced- compliant false confession. In these cases, suspects have the private belief that they are inno- *Corresponding author. E-mail: R. Horselenberg@psychology.unimaas.nl ISSN 1068-316X print; © 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/1068316021000057631

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