Coerced Confessions, Judicial Instruction, and Mock Juror Verdicts1

Saul M. Kassin · Lawrence S. Wrightsman

94 citations0/0 files storedJournal of Applied Social Psychology

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Deception detection and forensic psychology Criminal Law and Evidence Jury Decision Making Processes

Abstract

The present research assessed whether judicial instruction can curb jurors' inappropriate use of coerced‐confession evidence. In Experiment 1, subjects read an auto theft trial in which the defendant had confessed on his own initiative (no constraint), after an offer of leniency (positive constraint), or after a threat of punishment (negative constraint). Subjects then received an instruction that simply directed them to ignore a coerced confession (short form), another that additionally defined both positive and negative inducement as coercive and hence unreliable (long form), or no instruction at all. As previously reported (Kassin & Wrightsman, 1980), subjects fully discounted the negatively constrained confession but not the positively induced one which, although judged involuntary, produced a high percentage of guilty verdicts. Neither form of instruction significantly reduced this latter tendency. In Experiment 2, subjects read an assault case involving a voluntary or positively coerced confession and one of four types of instruction. The positive coercion bias was replicated. An instruction that stressed both the unreliability and unfairness of an induced confession decreased voluntariness judgments but failed to lower the conviction rate. The theoretical basis for and practical implications of this phenomenon are discussed, and future research directions are proposed.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 94 citations exist upstream.

References

1977Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes.1987Attribution in social interaction.1971The American Jury 1967The American Jury.1977Juridic decisions: In ignorance of the law or in light of it?1978Reducing the effects of juror bias.1971Quantifying Burdens of Proof 1973Effects of inadmissible Evidence on the Decisions of Simulated Jurors: A Moral Dilemma

Cited by

2010Jurors believe interrogation tactics are not likely to elicit false confessions: will expert witness testimony inform them otherwise?1986Videotaped Confessions: The Impact of Camera Point of View on Judgments of Coercion1 2002Videotaped interrogations and confessions: A simple change in camera perspective alters verdicts in simulated trials.2011Police-induced confessions: an empirical analysis of their content and impact 2015The Social Psychology of False Confessions 2013Comparing the effects of explicit and implicit false-evidence ploys on Mock Jurors' verdicts, sentencing recommendations, and perceptions of police interrogation

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.