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.
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Appearances
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, no, I never touched it.
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.
Was she here the whole time? Ninety-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.
Are 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 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 it. It 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.
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, 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. He said, you know what, $820 is missing. It looks like you did it. It looks like you took the money.
And Robles said, I didn't do that, and I wouldn't do it.
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, it turns out that the $820 was not lost. It was a clerical error, and no money was stolen. But it was too late. He had 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 it was going to keep a job. And so he signed the confession.
Well, for starters, those sessions should be fully recorded. so that you and I, 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.
I couldn't have put it better. You're absolutely right.
Shaka, you are very, very welcome. It's a pleasure.
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