Saul Kassin
speaker
97 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Saul Kassin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
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?
I was a huge Yankees fan. And I wanted to do a really good job.
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 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.
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.
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.
My first response was, well, that's interesting. It looks like we'll have to remove confessions from evidence in order to use cases.
It became a nuisance variable. So right away, we tossed out cases involving confessions because confessions were a nuisance.
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.
Well, for starters, the opening salvo of an interrogation was to bring in a suspect and declare an accusation of guilt.
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'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, OK, wow, these are powerful tactics.
These are almost Milgram-esque.
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.
When you look at this paradigm, you go, nobody's going to do that.
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.
Showing 1–20 of 97 · page 1 of 5
Next →