Why on
earth would an innocent person falsely confess to committing a crime To most
people, it just doesn’t seem logical. But it is logical, say experts, if you
understand what can happen in a police interrogation (审讯) room.
Under the right conditions, people’s minds are susceptible (易受影响的) to
influence, and the pressure put on suspects during police questioning is
enormous; (46) "The pressure is important to understand,
because otherwise it’s impossible to understand why someone would say he did
something he didn’t do. The answer is: to put an end to an uncomfortable
situation that will continue until he does confess."
Developmental psychologist Mary Redlich recently conducted a laboratory
study to determine how likely people are to confess to things they didn’t do.
(47) The researchers then intentionally crashed the
computers and accused the participants of hitting the "alt" key to see if they
would sign a statement falsely taking responsibility. Redlich’s
findings clearly demonstrate how easy it can be to get people to falsely
confess: 59 percent of the young adults in the experiment immediately confessed.
(48) Of the 15- to 16-year-olds, 72 percent signed
confessions, as did 78 percent of the 12- to 13-year-olds.
"There’s no question that young people are more at risk," says Saul
Kassin, a psychology professor at Williams College, who has done similar studies
with similar results. (49) Both Kassin and
Redlich note that the entire "interrogation" in their experiments consisted of a
simple accusation-not hours of aggressive questioning-and still, most
participants falsely confessed. (50) "In
some ways," says Kassin, "false confession becomes a rational decision." A
In her experiment, participants were seated at computers and told not to
hit the "alt" key, because doing so would crash the systems. B Because
of the stress of a police interrogation, they conclude, suspects can become
convinced that falsely confessing is the easiest way out of a bad
situation. C "It’s a little like somebody’s working on them with a
dental (牙齿的) drill," says Franklin Zimring, a law professor at the University of
California at Berkeley. D "But the baseline is that adults are highly
vulnerable too." E The court found him innocent and he was
released. F Redlich also found that the younger the participant, the
more likely a false confession.