Did I Really Do That?
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What is the psychological basis for false confessions?
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.
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?
How and why people come to betray their self-interest This week on Hidden Brain. In the sixth grade, Saul Kassin 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.
I was a huge Yankees fan. And I wanted to do a really good job.
The baseball star was not the only object of Saul's affections. His sixth grade teacher was up on a pedestal too.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
My first response was, well, that's interesting. It looks like we'll have to remove confessions from evidence in order to use cases.
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