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What Do Laboratory False Confession Paradigms Actually Measure?

Across 99 experimental conditions, 41% of innocent participants signed a false confession. More strikingly, 37% did so in control conditions where the experimenter typically did little more than accuse them. Our new paper asks what behavior these experiments are actually measuring, and how far their results can be carried into real interrogations, courts, and policy.

false confessions interrogation meta-analysis construct validity

Do Deceptive Interrogation Bans Affect Juvenile Case Resolution? Nine-State Results, Now Out in Crime & Delinquency

Nine states banned deceptive interrogation tactics for juveniles between 2022 and 2024, raising concerns among some that the tradeoff would be fewer cases solved. Across 510,582 juvenile-involved incidents in NIBRS (2021-2024), arrest clearances did not decline after adoption --- estimates are null to modestly positive across every method --- and prosecution declinations, the one measure that fell, fell for adults in the same states too.

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Seeing Confessions Clearly: Why the Standard Score for Interrogation Methods Rewards Silence

For two decades, interrogation research has graded techniques with a single ratio: true confessions divided by false confessions. That ratio cannot tell the difference between a method that is better at separating guilty from innocent suspects and one that simply makes confessing harder for everyone. An interactive dashboard demonstrates the problem.

false confessions interrogation signal detection theory measurement