Why Are Innocent Suspects Confessing?

            I recently read an article from Science Daily that I found to be very interesting, called “Why Innocent Suspects May Confess to a Crime”. The article was examining the reasons behind people falsely confessing to a crime that they did not commit.

            According to The Innocence Project, out of the 266 post-conviction DNA exonerations over the last 20 years, 25% of them involved a false confession. A study was done by the Iowa State University which tried to understand the reasons for which someone would confess to a crime despite their innocence. The answer came down to short-term versus long-term consequences.

            The first experiment interviewed 81 psychology undergraduates, men and women, about illegal and immoral behaviour. Their admissions and denials were paired with either short-term or long-term consequences, the short-term consequences being a long set of repetitive questions, and the long-term consequences being having to meet with a police officer in a couple months to discuss their answers in full. It was found as a result of this study that the participants made decisions to avoid the proximal (short-term) repetitive questions.

            The second experiment interviewed 143 men and women from Iowa State University in the same manner, except this time, the proximal and distal consequences were reversed (the proximal consequences being going to meet with an officer directly after the interview, and the distal consequences being returning to the lab in a number of weeks to answer repetitive questions). Surprisingly, the results were found to be similar, as the participants tended to accept the long-term effects in order to avoid any short-term annoyances.

            In both experiments the participants responded in a way which eliminated proximal penalties as opposed to distal ones. The researchers think that these results help to explain why an innocent person would confess to a crime which they did not commit. Since DNA evidence is used to exonerate cases which involve atrocious crimes, the innocent suspects assume that the truth will comes out eventually, and that any possibility of long-term consequences like conviction, prison, or even a death sentence, is very unlikely.

Because of this, I think when the suspect weighs the two consequences (proximal and distal) in his/her mind, their behaviour will be shaped in a way that allows them to avoid consequences happening right now, versus the ones that may happen in the future. I think it is wrong that so many people feel the need to falsely confess to a horrible crime that they did not commit, and something must be wrong with the system that it has such a high percentage of suspects being wrongly accused. I see a need for police interrogation methods to change so that it limits these methods from encouraging suspects to make decisions based on gains in the short term, as opposed to telling the truth about their situations.

If anyone is interested in the article, here is a link: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110218111825.htm.

Thank you.