Citation in APA format: Kassin, S. M., & Douglass, A. B. (2025). Justice and law. In D. T. Gilbert, S. T. Fiske, E. J. Finkel, & W. B. Mendes (Eds.), The handbook of social psychology (6th ed.). Situational Press. https://doi.org/10.70400/SYEY9233

Justice and Law 

Saul M. Kassin, City University of New York 

Amy Bradfield Douglass, Bates College 

OVERVIEW AND HISTORY 

“If social scientists assume the responsibility of developing their own safeguards, the social and psychological sciences are at present on the threshold of making direct and significant contributions to the progress of a rapidly changing society.”

Dr. Kenneth B. Clark (1953, p. 10)    

When Dr. Kenneth Clark wrote these words in 1953, he might have been unaware of just how close to the threshold of contribution psychological science was. Indeed, just one year later, psychological research made its first appearance in a United States Supreme Court opinion, the historic Brown vs. Board of Education (1954) decision, which overturned the previously held “separate but equal” doctrine laid out in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). For all its import in the history of psychology and law, this moment is simply marked by Footnote 11, accompanying the majority opinion’s contention that “Whatever may have been the extent of psychological knowledge at the time of Plessy v. Ferguson, [negative psychological effects of segregation are] amply supported by modern authority.” The footnote includes reference to several examples of “modern authority,” including those produced by Dr. Kenneth B. Clark, the first Black president of the American Psychological Association, and his wife Dr. Mamie Phipps Clark, the first Black woman to earn a psychology Ph.D. from Columbia University.   

In the years since the U.S. Supreme Court first acknowledged social science research, courts around the country have done so on a regular basis. Sometimes this acknowledgment affirms the work of psychological scientists, as when a special master appointed in New Jersey referred to research on eyewitness decision-making as the “gold standard in terms of the applicability of social science research to law” in arguing that many of the research-based recommendations should be applied to the collection of eyewitness evidence (State v. Henderson, 2011). At other times, judicial decisions seem to disregard, if not outright contradict, empirical research, even as justices “assume the [research] is valid statistically” (McClesky v. Kemp, 1987; see Baldus et al., 1983). In the following sections, we trace the relationship between psychology and law across myriad domains, noting areas in which the relationship has been fruitful and productive, as well as those research areas in which the promise has not yet been realized.   

The relationship between psychology and the law had an inauspicious beginning. In 1908, Harvard Professor Hugo Munsterberg (1908) published On the Witness Stand, a classic and controversial book, well ahead of its time. Munsterberg had received his Ph.D. under Wilhelm Wundt at the University of Leipzig, after which he pioneered several fields of applied psychology. In On the Witness Stand, Munsterberg addressed a broad spectrum of topics, including juries, eyewitness memory, hypnosis, suggestibility, lie detection, and confessions. “My purpose,” he noted in his introduction, was “to turn the attention of serious men to an absurdly neglected field which demands the full attention of the social community” (p. 12). As laudable as Munsterberg’s goal was, many of his contemporaries saw him as arrogant and rejected his perspective on their field. Indeed, some in the legal community so resented him that his book inspired a spirited counteroffensive by legal scholar, Professor John Henry Wigmore (1909).    

Munsterberg was not the only psychologist to venture into law at that time (see Bornstein & Penrod, 2008). In 1895, James McKeen Cattell had published an empirical study on the psychology of testimony in Science. In what is arguably the first psychology-and-law experiment ever conducted, Cattell presented an array of memory questions to college students (e.g., “in which direction do the seeds of an apple point?”) and gave them 30 seconds to respond and indicate a level of confidence. Noting that witnesses are often asked to recount crime scene details from memory, he found that participants exhibited low rates of accuracy and that variations in confidence levels were untethered to performance. As he put it, “We see that conflicting evidence is offered in courts of justice when no perjury is intended” (p. 761). Alfred Binet (1900) then replicated Cattell’s results in France using a similar methodology; William Stern (2010), a student of Hermann Ebbinghaus, did the same in Germany by staging a live conflict in front of a law class in which one of the disputants drew a revolver. Shortly thereafter, William Marston, a student of Munsterberg’s, received both his Ph.D. and a law degree. Working in the lab, Marston (1917) noticed a significant positive correlation between systolic blood pressure and lying, an observation that would later become the basis of the modern polygraph.  

Since those pioneering early days, social, cognitive, developmental, personality, and neuropsychologists interested in law have improved the methods and widened the scope. Some research programs in particular set into motion areas of research that flourish to this day. Yet, social psychology’s foray within the courts, like it’s Lewinian move toward applications to health, education, the workplace, and other social venues (see Marrow, 1969), was not always met with acceptance. Inspired by the work of Kenneth and Mamie Phipps Clark, whose famous “doll studies,” as noted above, marked the first time that psychology research was cited by the U.S. Supreme Court (Brown v. Board of Education, 1954).  Yet in 1967, Phoebe Ellsworth, a noted law and psychology scholar who was then a graduate student at Stanford, recalls an incident in which she approached a senior faculty member who said, “This is Stanford. We don’t do applied research here” (Ellsworth, 2022, p. 179). Similarly, distinguished law and psychology scholar Gary Wells recalls that when he graduated from Ohio State’s social psychology program in 1977, his advisor offered some parting friendly advice—that he abandon his interest in eyewitness identification research because: “That line of work has no future” (Wells, 2022, p. 295). 

In 1966, Henry Kalven and Hans Zeisel published The American Jury, a classic book in which they surveyed 555 judges who had presided over 3,576 criminal jury trials nationwide. While juries deliberated, the judges indicated in a questionnaire what their verdict would be. A comparison showed , first, that judges and juries agreed on 78% of their verdicts and second, that most disagreements occurred because the jury voted to acquit a defendant that judges would have convicted. This project inspired a generation of jury research and consulting that has continued to this day. By analyzing existing court records, interviewing real jurors after trial, bringing “shadow juries” into the courtroom, and presenting mock jurors with trial summaries or simulations in person or online, psychologists have dissected the three stages of jury decision-making: (1) jury selection, (2) the presentation of evidence, arguments, and instructions in court, and (3) the jury’s deliberation to a verdict. We will return to this topic later. 

Then in the 1970’s, psychologists forayed into the study of eyewitness memory. Following on the heels of Munsterberg (1908), Buckhout (1974) published an article in Scientific American on factors that can impair eyewitness identifications through their effects on perception, memory, and suggestibility. These included personal and situational factors present when a crime is observed, over time, and during retrieval. As Munsterberg had done years earlier, Buckhout staged assaults in a classroom followed by lineup presentations to demonstrate the perils of eyewitness evidence. That same year, Loftus and Palmer (1974) published the first (and now classic) experiment on misinformation effects on eyewitness memory. Using a laboratory paradigm, they had participants view a film of a traffic accident after which they asked, “About how fast were the cars going when they hit each other?” Other participants answered the same question, except that the verb “hit” was replaced by “smashed,” “collided,” “bumped,” or “contacted.” All participants saw the same accident, yet question wording altered their estimates of how fast the cars were going and whether there was broken glass at the scene: Sixteen percent of participants reported seeing broken glass when the cars “smashed” into each other, whereas only 7% reported seeing broken glass when the cars “hit” each other.  

Shortly thereafter, Wells (1978) published a JPSP article in which he distinguished between system variables that can be controlled within the justice system (e.g., how lineups are assembled, how witnesses are instructed) and estimator variables that cannot be controlled (e.g., distance, lighting, the culprit’s race). Over the years, this distinction has served as a catalyst for research aimed at the reform of eyewitness identification procedures. Although originally framed in the eyewitness context, the distinction between estimator and system variables can be applied throughout psycholegal research. For example, in the context of false confessions, intellectual disability is an estimator variable because whether a suspect has an intellectual disability is not under the control of the justice system, even though it has predictable effects on the reliability of confessions (e.g., Gudjonsson, 2018). In the same domain, whether an interrogation is video recorded for later viewing is a system variable because courts and policy makers can implement recording as standard practice if research suggests that such a procedural change reduces coercion (e.g., Kassin et al., 2014). In the context of jury decision-making, the system can control whether jurors are allowed to take notes or ask questions; it cannot truly control whether they are influenced by extralegal information such as pretrial publicity (e.g., Hoetger et al., 2022). 

Two applications of social psychology to justice and law that do not fall within the scope of this chapter also made their appearance in the 1970s. In a highly controversial study, Zimbardo et al. (1973) conducted the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment, which had to be aborted in part because of the cruelty exhibited by guards in their simulated prison (for a retrospective, see Haney & Zimbardo, 1998). Immediately and over subsequent years, this research (which, like Milgram’s classic obedience studies, exemplified the situationist message of social psychology) was criticized on methodological and ethical grounds (e.g., Banuazizi & Movahedi, 1975; Le Texier, 2019; for a defense, see Zimbardo, 2018). Although the topic falls outside the scope of this chapter, its relevance as an early application of social psychology to criminal justice is evident. It is no secret that the prison population in the United States has grown over the years, a problem of “mass incarceration” (National Academy of Sciences, 2014; Simon, 2014). It is also no secret that prisons are overcrowded and that prison life can be oppressive. Indeed, many inmates are socially deprived in solitary confinement for long stretches of time, a form of social isolation that can have devastating effects on their mental and physical health (Haney, 2018). 

Also in the 1970s, social psychologists commenced the systematic study of procedural justice, a term used to describe the procedural variations that influence people’s perceptions of fairness (Thibaut et al., 1974; Thibaut & Walker, 1975). Early on, this research showed that people’s sense that a legal decision was fair rests not only on its favorable or unfavorable outcome, but also on the process by which it was reached. Win or lose, it is important for people to believe that they had a voice in the proceedings, that they were treated with dignity and respect, that the process was transparent, and that the decision-maker was impartial (Lind & Tyler, 1988). Although this topic falls beyond the scope of this chapter, it is important to note that perceptions of fairness are essential for people to see criminal justice institutions such as police, the courts, and prisons as legitimate, and hence worthy of compliance (Blader & Tyler, 2003; Tyler, 2006; Tyler et al., 2015; Walters & Bolger, 2019).     

 Over the years, topics in this area have grown more numerous and research methods have become more diverse, increasing the impact that social psychologists have had on policy and practice throughout the legal system. The American Psychology-Law Society (AP-LS) was founded in 1969, and it now has over 1,600 members. AP-LS was then incorporated into APA as Division 41 with Law and Human Behavior and Psychology, Public Policy, and Law as its flagship journals. Building upon the excellent prior Handbook chapters on social psychology and law (Ellsworth & Mauro, 1998; Kovera & Borgida, 2010), we review research on two broad, high-profile sets of topics: (1) The social psychology of evidence that is relevant to wrongful convictions, focusing on eyewitness identifications, alibis, police-induced confessions, and the forensic sciences; and (2) legal decision-making, focusing on jury trials and plea bargaining in lieu of trial. 

THE SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY OF EVIDENCE 

Once a crime is committed, detected, and reported, a police investigation commences. Depending on the nature of the case, the crime scene is analyzed, physical evidence is processed, witnesses and other persons of interest are interviewed, and suspects are identified. These suspects may be polygraphed, placed in a lineup, interviewed, and interrogated.  If an arrest is made, the suspect is jailed or bail is set and a judge or grand jury decides if there is sufficient evidence for a formal accusation. If there is sufficient evidence, prosecutors and defense lawyers begin a process known as “discovery.”  

Currently, 97% of defendants in the United States plead guilty as part of a negotiated plea deal. In the few cases that go to trial, a judge or jury renders a verdict after which the judge determines the sentence for defendants found guilty. In these latter cases, many defendants are incarcerated, and many appeal their convictions. In short, the criminal justice apparatus is multilayered and the relevant actors are numerous. Social psychologists have studied various aspects of this system (e.g., Borgida & Fiske, 2008; Brewer & Douglass, 2019; Costanzo & Krauss, 2021; Kassin & Kovera, 2019). 

This chapter focuses on the advances that social (and, by extension, social-related) psychologists have made in various areas of criminal justice and law. In particular, the research reviewed in this chapter is focused on two overarching topics: (1) accuracy, error, and bias in the collection and interpretation of evidence (i.e., eyewitness identifications, alibis, confessions, incentivized informants, the forensic sciences, and expert testimony), and (2) legal-decisions made by the actors in the criminal justice system (in particular, judges and juries that render verdicts in the courtroom and prosecutors, defense lawyers, and defendants who accept or reject guilty pleas instead of taking their chances at trial. 

Eyewitness Testimony 

Eyewitnesses are important sources of evidence. Although the canonical version of an eyewitness is one who points dramatically at the defendant in a trial, eyewitnesses interact with the justice system in many more ways than this. For example, witnesses for whom an investigation does not generate a viable suspect will not encounter an identification procedure, nor will they testify. Witnesses who report crimes committed by known individuals will not encounter an identification procedure, even though they might testify. As one example, children reporting sexual abuse by family members do not complete identification procedures because the accused is already known to them. In those cases, the key issues are whether child witnesses can report accurately on what they have experienced, and in the case of repeated abuse events, whether they can differentiate events from one another. For eyewitnesses who do encounter an identification procedure, they might not testify if the defendant pleads guilty and there is no trial. They also might not testify if they identify a lineup member or “filler” known to be innocent and the investigation stalls because there is no other viable evidence. 

Psychological research has examined the conditions under which eyewitnesses make errors at each point in their interactions with the criminal justice system,. As previously noted, variables affecting eyewitnesses can be categorized as estimator variables (i.e., not controllable by the justice system) or system variables (i.e., controllable by the justice system). Beyond simply identifying variables associated with errors, research has generated empirically-validated system variable solutions designed to prevent eyewitness errors from occurring or to prevent those errors from resulting in a wrongful conviction. 

The Scope of the Problem 

The United States Supreme Court has described eyewitness misidentification as the “primary evil” to be avoided in criminal trials involving eyewitness evidence (Neil v. Biggers, 1972). In spite of the potential for this “evil” to undermine the integrity of criminal trials, the Supreme Court has taken up eyewitness evidence issues in only a few cases. In each case, the justices acknowledged the persuasiveness of this evidence and the potential for error. For example, in 1967, the Court noted that eyewitness identification testimony is “proverbially untrustworthy” (United States v. Wade). Ten years later, Manson v. Brathwaite (1977) noted that juries should not “hear eyewitness testimony unless that evidence has aspects of reliability.” Even though the Court recognizes the potential for error in eyewitness evidence when it considers such evidence, psychological scientists would likely share Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s frustration in the Court’s most recent treatment of eyewitness identification evidence (Perry v. New Hampshire, 2012) that social science research on the topic “merits barely a parenthetical mention in the majority opinion.” 

 The theoretical concerns articulated by Supreme Court justices are supported by analyses of cases in which innocent people were wrongfully convicted. Indeed, the bulk of wrongful convictions overturned by DNA evidence – nearly 75% according to some estimates – contain eyewitness errors (Garrett, 2011). Some of these cases involved multiple eyewitnesses, all of whom converged on the same innocent suspect (e.g., Junkin, 2004) and/or witnesses who were very confident in their mistaken identification (e.g., Thompson-Cannino, Cotton, & Torneo, 2009). The role of mistaken identifications is also clear in cases that were not overturned by DNA evidence. Indeed, the National Registry of Exonerations (NRE), which collects data on all wrongful convictions (thus far, they have archived over 3,500 cases) finds that 30% of their cases contained one or more eyewitness identification errors (National Registry of Exonerations, 2016). This category of errors is limited to those in which eyewitness errors represent genuine mistakes. According to the NRE, another 26% of cases involve witnesses who deliberately misidentified a suspect or accused an innocent suspect of a fabricated crime, possibly as a function of coercive interviewing by police. This latter category of eyewitness errors is immune to research-based changes in identification procedures (although other system-level changes may be relevant). Therefore, we will not discuss this type of eyewitness error further.  

Beyond the profound devastation wrought on innocent people who are convicted, a cascade of ancillary effects occurs after a wrongful conviction. First, these convictions leave the door open for true culprits to commit future crimes. Second, eyewitnesses who learn of their mistake may be traumatized by their inadvertent role in sending an innocent person to prison. A poignant narrative detailing this latter effect is available in a book co-written by Jennifer Thompson, a victim of sexual assault who misidentified her attacker as Ronald Cotton (Thompson-Cannino et al., 2009).  As a result of this misidentification, Ronald Cotton spent 11 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. After Cotton was exonerated, he and Thompson co- wrote a book outlining their experiences and eventual reconciliation (Thompson-Cannino et al.). Finally, there are financial consequences for municipalities and states when wrongfully convicted individuals are awarded financial compensation, either through legislation or civil litigation. 

Eyewitness evidence has the potential for “evil” in part because it constitutes direct evidence, rather than indirect evidence. Indirect evidence is persuasive because it establishes an association between a criminal suspect and guilt. Fingerprints, for example, establish that a suspect was at a crime scene but only indirectly suggest guilt because they do not establish what that suspect did while at the scene. Eyewitness evidence is powerful because witnesses provide evidence about what the culprit did. Therefore, it directly incriminates a suspect. Believing an eyewitness’s report – and the witness’s subsequent identification - means that the person identified by the witness committed the crime.    

Despite the promise of eyewitness identification evidence, there are many ways in which it can lose its probative potential. This is due to two competing pressures that can reduce eyewitness accuracy: the natural fallibility of human memory and the potential for social influence in reporting details of a crime, making an identification, and testifying at trial. As we know from research, human memory is imperfect, vulnerable to error at encoding, storage, and retrieval stages (e.g., Schacter, 2001, 2022). The natural fallibility of memory is what motivates the categorization of witness memory as trace evidence, one that is deserving of the same preservation measures afforded to other forms of forensic evidence, like blood samples and fingerprints (e.g., Wells, 2020).  

The integrity of eyewitness evidence faces another challenge beyond the mere fallibility of human memory: the influence of other actors in the justice system. For example, eyewitnesses can be compromised by various aspects of the crime (e.g., stress, poor viewing conditions), intervening events between the crime and attempted identification (e.g., co-witness influences, pretrial exposure to the suspect), suggestive aspects of the identification procedures (e.g., showups in which only one suspect is presented), and post-identification influences (e.g., comments from lineup administrators, repeated questioning, e.g., see Sauer et al., 2019).   

Eyewitness Research Methodologies 

Eyewitness research paradigms span the continuum of ecological validity. At the low end are experiments in which mock witnesses see slides (e.g., Loftus & Palmer, 1974), simple line drawings (e.g., Baron et al., 1996), or make old/new decisions on a series of photos (Malpass, 1974). These paradigms are effective when experimental manipulations are straightforward or high levels of experimental control are required. At the higher end of the ecological validity continuum are research paradigms in which participants are immersed in realistic staged crimes, sometimes complete with uniformed officers responding to the reported “crime” (e.g., Eisen et al., 2017; Luus & Wells, 1994) or when people participate in realistic simulations of hostile interrogations (e.g., Morgan et al., 2004). 

Ecological validity is also maximized when research participants are tested in the field (e.g., Morgan et al., 2004). As one creative example, researchers tested identification performance for visitors to the Horror Labyrinth at the London Dungeon (Valentine & Mesout, 2009). Another experiment tested participants’ estimates of the distance between themselves and a target in varied locations from a “campus to city streets and a botanical garden” (Lindsay et al., 2008, p. 528).  Other ways to maximize ecological validity include field studies of actual witnesses to criminal cases (e.g., Wright & Skagerberg, 2007) or archival analyses (e.g., Horry et al., 2014).  The downside to the latter approaches is that it is usually not possible to determine the “ground truth” about the events that the eyewitness saw.  

Paradigms that test the influence of co-witnesses often use confederates. This is because effectively examining how witnesses are influenced by other people requires them to interact. Sometimes this is accomplished through simple conversations among witnesses who viewed stimulus materials together and then discussed their memories (e.g., Wright et al., 2000). Other investigations involve creatively deceiving witnesses so they think their co-witness saw the same stimulus materials as they did (e.g., French et al., 2009). Manipulations of co-witness relationship status have used techniques in which participants come to the laboratory with a friend. Sometimes the pairs of friends participate together and sometimes pairs are reconfigured so that each person is participating with a stranger (e.g., Hope et al., 2008).   

Some research questions have necessitated a shift to online data collection paradigms because some data analytic approaches demand massive numbers of participants (e.g., Mickes et al., 2012).  Although online paradigms are an easy way to collect data from large numbers of people, there are reasonable concerns about the legitimacy of data collected online and about what is lost when research paradigms neglect social aspects of the interaction between witnesses and lineup administrators or among witnesses (e.g., Kovera & Evelo, 2021). Future research should combine elements of both kinds of paradigms, online and in-person, to maximize our understanding of eyewitness behavior (e.g., Douglass, 2021).  

Estimator Variables: How Elements of the Crime Affect Witness Accuracy 

How a crime unfolds is out of the control of the justice system. Nevertheless, features of the crime, perpetrator, or witness – which are called estimator variables – affect witnesses’ ability to encode details of the culprit.  Stress is one estimator variable with significant negative impacts on eyewitness accuracy (e.g., Deffenbacher et al., 2004). In one demonstration of this phenomenon (Morgan et al., 2004), military personnel undergoing survival training exercises were interrogated under conditions of sleep and food deprivation. Those personnel interrogated with threats of physical violence (i.e., high stress) were later less able to identify their interrogator than were personnel whose interrogations lacked the threat of physical confrontation (i.e., low stress).  

The original articulation of the distinction between estimator and system variables included other possible influences on eyewitness memory, including crime seriousness, exposure time, familiarity, event complexity, race, sex, age, attractiveness (Wells, 1978). Many of these variables have been extensively studied ever since Wells introduced this distinction more than 40 years ago. For example, there is empirical evidence that cross-race identifications are more prone to error than are same-race identifications (e.g., Meissner & Brigham, 2001) and that children are particularly vulnerable to error, especially if questioning is suggestive (e.g., Price & Ornstein, 2022). Additional relevant variables that impair eyewitness accuracy – but that cannot be controlled by the system – include alcohol intoxication (e.g., Harvey, & Sekulla, 2021), the presence of a weapon, which draws the witness’s limited attention (e.g., Carlson et al., 2016; Fawcett et al., 2016), and exposure to co-witness reports (e.g., Hope et al., 2008). 

System Variables: How Eyewitness Evidence Can Be Improved 

System variables can be controlled at three points where eyewitnesses can inform (or misdirect) a criminal case: when a crime is initially reported, when an identification is made, and when a witness testifies.  

Eyewitness memory reports

For many eyewitnesses, the first point of contact with the criminal justice system is reporting a crime to authorities. As previously noted, one of the classic studies in eyewitness memory (Loftus & Palmer, 1974) tested the influence of a system variable in the form of a simple wording change. As these studies demonstrated, it is remarkably easy to shift witness reports as a function of question wording. One reasonable question from those studies is whether external variables can do more than change reports to the relatively banal question of whether broken glass was at a scene. Indeed, empirical evidence suggests that it is possible to shift witness reports in quite dramatic ways. Some of the most fascinating examples of this possibility come from investigations into autobiographical memory reports in which people are induced to “recall” events from childhood that did not happen (e.g., being lost in a shopping mall, Loftus, 1993). Misremembering is especially likely if people are encouraged to imagine what might have happened (e.g., Garry et al., 1996), given photographs of themselves around the age of the alleged event (e.g., Lindsay et al., 2004), or exposed to trusted others who suggest the event did happen (e.g., Loftus, 1997).    

The task of recalling details of one’s own life (i.e., autobiographical memory) is substantially different from the task of an eyewitness who typically must recall a single event consisting of an interaction with a stranger. Nevertheless, research on autobiographical memory is relevant to the current discussion for three reasons. First, this research provides evidence regarding the malleability of memory, reinforcing calls for eyewitness evidence to be treated carefully as a form of trace evidence (e.g., Wells, 2020). Second, some eyewitnesses do provide evidence similar to autobiographical reports. For example, child victims of sexual abuse often must report on events that involve familiar people and about events that happened multiple times. These events are not always reported immediately, in contrast with the relatively higher likelihood of immediate reporting for eyewitnesses to singular criminal events. Third, autobiographical recall is relevant to alibi generation, discussed later in this chapter. 

Interviewing eyewitnesses

More relevant to the typical eyewitness scenario is how to extract maximum accurate information from witnesses while minimizing inaccurate information. One counterproductive strategy is to introduce suggestive questioning techniques that could include introducing new information or invoking co-witness statements (e.g., Schreiber et al., 2006). Even very subtle social dynamics affect reporting. For example, matching the reporting goals of interviewers and witnesses increases accurate reporting (Douglass et al., 2013). Given the potential for questioning to affect eyewitness recall, psychologists developed the Cognitive Interview (Fisher & Geiselman, 1992; Geiselman et al., 1985). Compared with a standard police interview, the Cognitive Interview increases accurate recall by encouraging interviewers to ask open-ended questions, without interruption, and encouraging witnesses to recall events from multiple perspectives and in different temporal orders. Field studies demonstrate the superiority of the Cognitive Interview to standard interview protocols in eliciting useful information from individuals who have information about terrorism cases (Ashkenazi & Fisher, 2022). 

Despite its name, the Cognitive Interview has elements that are decidedly social. Indeed, the protocol “addresses some of the critical social skills that are particularly important when interviewing victims of crime: developing rapport, maintaining the eyewitness’s confidence, and controlling the eyewitness’s anxiety” (Fisher et al., 1994, p. 252). Although routinely recommended as an effective strategy for investigative interviews, rapport has no universal definition (Vallano & Schreiber Compo, 2015) and the effects of rapport are uneven, with some investigations showing that some operationalizations of rapport increase accurate recall (e.g., Nahouli et al., 2021) and others showing null effects (e.g., Carol et al., 2021). In paradigms where rapport does increase accurate recall, the mechanism of the effect is not yet clear (Wolfs et al., 2022). There is recent evidence suggesting that rapport increases feelings of benevolence toward the interviewer which might explain its positive effects when they occur (Carol et al., 2021).  

Influence of co-witnesses

Witnesses who do not immediately report a crime to authorities might instead discuss it with others who saw the same event. Such conversations may also occur after a crime is reported. The fact that co-witnesses can influence each other is consistent with classic studies of social conformity (e.g., Asch, 1956; Sherif, 1936). Indeed, some research is based heavily on these classic paradigms. The prevalence of co-witnesses is not trivial: One survey of real witnesses indicated that 88% reported witnessing a crime with at least one other person (Skagerberg & Wright, 2008; see also, e.g., Paterson & Kemp, 2006; Wright & McDaid, 1996). The prevalence of conversation between those co-witnesses ranged from 46% for witnesses of violence against another person to 100% for witnesses of fraud, forgery, or sexual offenses (Skagerberg & Wright, 2008).  

The potential for influence as a function of these conversations is extensive. Previous research shows that co-witnesses can be particularly influential if they are seen as credible because they have specialized knowledge or experience (i.e., former police officers vs. electricians; Williamson et al., 2013). Moreover, influence does not depend on explicit conversations among co-witnesses: The mere thought of fellow witnesses can affect confidence in one’s memory report, albeit not accuracy. In one series of experiments, confidence ratings were lower when provided in public than when provided in private, even though the accuracy in the two reporting conditions was the same (Shaw et al., 2001).  

Post-identification feedback

One of the most well-studied variables affecting eyewitness memory reports is post-identification feedback (Wells & Bradfield, 1998). Post-identification feedback refers to comments made to witnesses after their identification that suggest the identification decision was correct (confirming feedback) or incorrect (disconfirming feedback). Because these comments are made after an identification, post-identification feedback does not affect witness choices. However, it does produce well-established effects on witnesses’ memory for aspects of the crime that are central to assessing their accuracy, including how good their view was, how willing they are to testify, how good a basis they had for their identification, and how much attention they paid to the culprit.  One of the most critical variables affected is retrospective confidence – how much confidence witnesses report at the time of their identification. In a meta-analysis of the post-identification feedback effect, data from over 7,000 participants from laboratories around the world revealed a large effect size when comparing confirming feedback (vs. no feedback) on retrospective confidence reports (d = 0.98, 95% CI [0.84, 1.12], Steblay et al., 2014). Post-identification feedback also affects retrospective confidence when measured in verbal statements rather than numeric estimates (Kenchel et al., 2021). 

Attention, view, and confidence are particularly relevant to witness reports because the United States Supreme Court has enshrined these as criteria for evaluating eyewitness testimony (along with the accuracy of the witness’s description and how much time has elapsed between the witnessed event and the identification attempt; Neil vs. Biggers, 1972; Manson v. Brathwaite, 1977). Similar criteria are used in other countries such as the United Kingdom (R. v Turnbull, 1976) and Australia (Domican v. The Queen, 1992). Recommending that triers of fact use these criteria is problematic because post-identification feedback can change the nature of these reports without changing the witness’s underlying identification accuracy. (Other variables that affect confidence are discussed later.)    

One interesting feature of post-identification feedback effects is the asymmetry evident in the effects of confirming feedback vs. disconfirming feedback. In studies that manipulate both types,  confirming feedback consistently produces stronger inflating effects than the deflating effects produced by disconfirming feedback (e.g., Wells & Bradfield, 1998). One explanation for this asymmetry is suggested by the Selective Cue Integration Framework (Charman et al., 2010) which argues that post-identification feedback effects occur because witnesses do not automatically generate judgments regarding confidence, view, etc. Instead, when confronted with these questions, witnesses search for external sources of information to inform their responses, especially when memory cues are weak.  This framework argues that disconfirming feedback has weaker effects on retrospective judgments because people “heavily scrutinize disconfirming information to attempt to reject it” (Charman et al., p. 207). This selective integration of confirming feedback – but not disconfirming feedback – explains why the former has large and predictable effects on retrospective judgments whereas the latter does not.   

Eyewitness identification decisions

In its simplest form, measuring eyewitness identification decisions consists of comparing how many witnesses do and do not identify the culprit. This conceptualization quickly becomes more complex as researchers introduce different variations of identification tasks. From a signal detection standpoint (Green & Swets, 1966), for example, a target-present photospread – one in which the actual culprit is present – produces three possible outcomes corresponding to witness responses. First, a witness might make an accurate identification of the culprit (a “hit”). Second, a witness might inaccurately identify a known innocent foil or (a “false alarm”). Third, a witness might fail to detect the culprit who is present in a photospread (a “miss”). 

If researchers use a target-absent photospread – in which each person featured is innocent – a different, but related, set of outcomes is possible, albeit more limited than for target-present photospreads. First, witnesses could make an identification and choose someone innocent.  This would be classified as a false alarm. In some research programs, any identification from a target-absent photospread is classified as a false alarm, whereas in others, a false alarm is only recorded if witnesses identify the person previously designated as the innocent suspect. The innocent suspect is usually determined by pilot testing to be a photo of a person who is similar in appearance to the actual culprit. The other response option for target-absent photospreads is to say the culprit is not present. This is a “correct rejection”.  

There has been considerable conversation in the field regarding optimal methods for measuring eyewitness performance. The ideal measurement tool allows researchers to assess the diagnosticity of an eyewitness’s decision, i.e., the extent to which the identification is diagnostic of the suspect’s guilt. Some argue that a straightforward signal detection approach is adequate (e.g., Wixted & Mickes, 2015). In this approach, hits and misses from target-present photospread are compared with false alarms and correct rejections from target-absent photospreads. Others argue that this signal detection approach inappropriately categorizes filler identifications as lineup rejections (e.g., Wells et al., 2015). Among those with this view, filler identifications are fundamentally different from lineup rejections because they provide exculpatory information about the suspect (e.g., Wells & Olson, 2002).  

 Different opinions about how to measure identification performance have inspired new methods. One example is deviation from perfect performance in which “perfect performance” is defined as an identification procedure in which 100% of the guilty suspects vs. 0 innocent suspects are identified (Smith et al., 2019; for an extensive treatment of various methods of measuring identification performance, see e.g., Smith et al., 2021). Researchers have also directed attention to the heretofore neglected potential for filler similarity to dramatically affect research conclusions (e.g., Lucas et al., 2021).  

Lineup presentation mode

One of the earliest system variables tested was lineup presentation mode: showing witnesses photos one at a time (i.e., sequentially) instead of in the typical all-at-once format (i.e., simultaneously). In the original comparison of sequential versus simultaneous photospread presentation, Lindsay and Wells (1985) found that sequential presentation reduced false identifications from target-absent photospreads (from a proportion of .43 in the simultaneous condition to .17 in the sequential condition). This finding was particularly exciting because decrements of a similar magnitude were not observed when the culprit was present: The proportion of correct identifications in the simultaneous condition was .58 compared with .50 in the sequential condition.  

The initial explanation for this so-called sequential superiority effect was that witnesses engage in relative judgment processes during an identification procedure wherein they compare photos to one another before selecting the one that best matches their memory of the culprit (Wells, 1993). When the culprit is not present, a sequential array interrupts this process by forcing witnesses to wait to see all the photos to determine if a better match to their memory will appear.  

Subsequent laboratory (e.g., Steblay et al., 2011) and field studies (e.g., Wells et al., 2015) confirmed this basic finding. However, one concern about the sequential procedure is that it reduces correct identifications of the culprit compared with simultaneous procedures (e.g., Steblay et al., 2001). Another concern is that the benefits of sequential procedures may be particular to how much the suspect resembles the fillers (e.g., Carlson & Gronlund, 2011).  In evaluating the collective opinion about the sequential procedure, the National Academy of Sciences (2014) wrote that the “relative superiority of competing identification procedures (i.e., simultaneous versus sequential) is unresolved” (p. 104). Additional research on the sequential procedure will be required to fully delineate relevant moderator variables that determine the conditions under which the procedure enhances diagnosticity while preserving accuracy when the culprit is present.   

Suggestive identification procedures

Eyewitness identification procedures can be suggestive for any number of reasons. The most overt form of suggestion occurs when a lineup administrator or police detective explicitly indicates to the witness who they should identify. Less direct forms of suggestion might include lying about a suspect after the witness indicates that the suspect bears some resemblance to the culprit. In one real case, a witness was shown a lineup five months after seeing his employer murdered as part of an armed robbery (https://cwc.law.northwestern.edu/freed-exonerated/angel-rodriguez/). During the lineup procedure, the witness mentioned that one of the individuals looked similar to the culprit. That individual–Angel Rodriguez–happened to be the police suspect. After hearing the witness’s tentative comment, police indicated that the person in question had been held for months by police and had put on weight since being incarcerated, presumably to help the witness understand why the match to their memory was not very strong (i.e., the ecphoric similarity was low, Tulving, 1981). Rodriguez spent 12 years in prison before an appeals court declared the primary witness’s testimony “unworthy of belief” and reversed his conviction. The influence exerted by detectives in this case was direct, obvious, specific, and successful. Indeed, the witness reported having been “coerced” to identify Rodriguez during the procedure (https://cwc.law.northwestern.edu/freed-exonerated/angel-rodriguez/).  

Other suggestive procedures include creating an array in which the suspect stands out from the filler photographs (e.g., Lindsay & Wells, 1980) or using “biased instructions” implying that the actual culprit is in the lineup (Malpass & Devine, 1981). Indeed, simply telling a witness that the culprit may or may not be present significantly reduces false identifications from target-absent photospreads (compared with a standard instruction asking witnesses to identify the person they saw or pick out the person they saw; e.g., Steblay, 1997).  

Inadvertent or accidental suggestion

Not all suggestion is as direct as the case of Angel Rodriquez was. However, from the perspective of a research psychologist, it is almost immaterial whether a suggestive procedure was created by malice, incompetence, or by accident. All that matters is whether the identification procedure is constructed in such a way as to suggest the correct answer. To date, courts draw a sharp distinction between intentional and accidental suggestion. The consequence is that, as seen elsewhere in this chapter, the United States Supreme Court sometimes diverges considerably from scientific consensus. This tension was readily apparent in the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Perry v. New Hampshire (2012). In this case, Barion Perry was identified by a witness, Nubia Blandon, as the person she saw breaking into cars outside her apartment building. On that night, when police came to talk with Blandon about the person she saw, she moved to the window of her apartment and indicated that the culprit was the man she saw outside, standing with police. Perry was standing there because police had encountered him in the parking lot upon responding to her call.  

Therefore, as a function of Nubia Blandon’s move to the window and the fact that Perry was standing in the parking lot alone, accompanied only by police, Perry was identified through a “showup,” a one-person identification procedure. Showups have been designated by the Court as “unnecessarily suggestive” (e.g., Neil v. Biggers, 1972). Because of the showup, Perry requested a pretrial hearing to determine whether the identification should be suppressed. His request was denied and he was convicted. On appeal, his request was again denied by the New Hampshire Appeals Court because the suggestive procedure was not “manufactured by police” and Blandon’s identification was “spontaneous” and “without inducement” (Perry v. New Hampshire, 2012). The case was heard by the United States Supreme Court and in an 8-1 decision, they affirmed the New Hampshire appeals court, agreeing that pretrial hearings were not required unless the suggestive procedure was orchestrated by police.  The lone dissenter, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, argued that a “major factor contributing” to the proverbial unreliability of eyewitness identification testimony was “the suggestibility inherent in the context of the pretrial identification.”  Her position – likely shared by most eyewitness researchers – was that the influence of suggestiveness is independent of whether it is orchestrated by police.  

Investigators’ expectations

Police investigators are powerful sources of influence on identification decisions. Influence can emerge through comments to eyewitnesses (e.g., asking whether “anyone in the lineup look[s] more similar to the person you saw than anyone else in the lineup,” Clark, Marshall, & Rosenthal, 2009, p. 66) or subtle nonverbal signals (e.g., smiling, Charman & Quiroz, 2016). In one experiment, suspect identifications increased from the double-blind condition compared with the single-blind condition, especially when the identification procedure used biased instructions and a simultaneous photospread (Greathouse & Kovera, 2009). Coding of the video-recorded lineup administration in Greathouse and Kovera (2009) revealed some clues as to the form of influence. As one example, compared with double-blind lineup administrators, single-blind administrators were more likely to encourage witnesses to examine all photos carefully. Investigator knowledge also affects what should be objective elements of the identification procedure, namely how an identification decision is recorded. In one experiment, lineup administrators who knew the suspect’s identity (i.e., nonblind) were less likely to record identifications of people known to be innocent as identification decisions than were investigators who were blind (Rodriguez & Berry, 2020; see also Rodriguez & Berry, 2014).  

Two additional empirical investigations demonstrate the power of investigators to influence witnesses.  In one experiment, participant-investigators showed photospreads to two witnesses. The first was a confederate who was directed to make an identification with high confidence or low confidence. The second person was a true participant-witness, naïve to the other witness’s identification decision. Even though the lineup administrator was double-blind for both witnesses, their experience with the first eyewitness influenced their behavior with the second eyewitness. In particular, lineup administrators whose first eyewitness was not confident were more likely to extract positive identifications of the suspect from the second eyewitness (Douglass et al., 2005). It appeared that the lineup administrator exerted more nonverbal influence when the first witness was not confident because they concluded the task was difficult and that the witness would need help. Second, investigator influence is so compelling to eyewitnesses that it occurs even when eyewitnesses are told that the lineup administrator does not know who the suspect is (Smalarz et al., 2021). Other elements that increase the influence of lineup administrators include verbal encouragement (Quinlivan et al., 2017) and physical proximity (Haw & Fisher, 2004; Phillips et al., 1999). 

Influence of co-witnesses

Just as co-witnesses can influence eyewitness memory reports, they can also influence identification decisions. One experiment used the classic Asch (1956) paradigm to demonstrate the influence of other people on identification decisions. In this paradigm, groups of three witnesses viewed a series of line drawings of individuals, making an identification after seeing a stimulus drawing of a person and then a photospread consisting of four separate drawings in which the culprit was always present. The group’s instructions were “to call out [the number of the] person who is the same as the original individual … I want you to call out numbers between 1 and 4 when answering.” (Baron et al., 1996, p. 917). Just as in the Asch paradigm, the confederates were directed to call out the wrong answer; the primary dependent variable was the number of trials on which participant-witnesses conformed to their co-witnesses’ wrong answers.  

Beyond simply replicating Asch in an eyewitness task, the experiment also tested the effects of task importance and task difficulty. In the low-importance condition, participants were told, “This is a pilot study whose goal is to try and develop materials to test eyewitness accuracy. It would be useful sometime in the future to develop a test that lets us know how accurate people are as eyewitnesses.” (p. 918). Those in the high-importance condition heard that the procedures being tested in the laboratory “will soon be adopted by police departments and courtrooms in cases involving eyewitness testimony” (p. 918). The task difficulty manipulation was operationalized by showing the original line drawings for a relatively short period of time (0.5 sec) or a relatively long period of time (5 sec).  

As predicted, task importance and task difficulty combined to affect conformity. Specifically, task difficulty had no impact for witnesses in the low importance condition.  For these witnesses, conformity was the same, regardless of whether the task was easy or difficult.  In contrast, for witnesses in the high importance condition, participants conformed on average on 51% of trials when the identification task was difficult, compared with only an average of 16% of trials when the task was easy.  These results have implications for co-witnessing scenarios in the real world: Witnesses are likely to be more influenced by co-witnesses when the task is difficult (e.g., witnessing conditions are poor) and the task is important (e.g., the crime is serious). 

Co-witness information does not have to be as direct and concrete as another person’s identification decision to exert influence. In one study, Zajac and Henderson (2009) had confederate witnesses make off-hand comments about the culprit’s eye color to a co-witness. Participant-witnesses then attempted an identification from a target-absent photospread in which all members had the eye color mentioned by the confederate. False identifications increased among those witnesses whose co-witness mentioned the culprit’s (incorrect) eye color.  Even more subtle forms of influence can affect eyewitness identification decisions. For example, simply knowing how quickly one’s co-witness made a decision from a photospread affects identification decisions (Douglass et al., 2020).  

Evaluating eyewitnesses

Even if eyewitnesses produce erroneous memory reports or mistakenly identify an innocent person, one safeguard still exists: the criminal trial. Although defendants have a right to a trial, nearly 97% of criminal cases are resolved by plea bargain. Not surprisingly, innocent individuals are much less likely than guilty ones to resolve their cases by plea bargain. Does the safeguard of a trial protect mistakenly identified defendants against wrongful convictions? The U.S. Supreme Court has confidence that it does, arguing that one way to control the “vagaries of eyewitness identification” is through “vigorously contested trials conducted by diligent counsel and judges” (Manson v. Brathwaite, 1977).  

For a trial to be “vigorous” (i.e., effective), judges and juries must correctly assess whether an eyewitness is accurate or inaccurate. In helping them with this task, the U.S. Supreme Court argues that defense attorneys “can expose the flaws in the eyewitness’ testimony during cross-examination and focus the jury’s attention on the fallibility of such testimony during opening and closing arguments” (Perry v. New Hampshire, 2012).  

Before the “protections” of a trial can be implemented, actors in the criminal justice system must determine if the evidence against the defendant is strong enough to proceed. One of the key elements used by all actors is the witness’s confidence (e.g., Brewer & Burke, 2002). Evaluators of eyewitness accuracy will sometimes ignore other variables connected to accuracy in favor of using eyewitness confidence as the sole guide to whether the identification is correct (e.g., Cutler et al., 1990). Confidence is such a powerful determinant of people’s evaluations that jurisdictions in the United Kingdom routinely decline to collect confidence reports to avoid a scenario in which the witness reports being less than 100% confident (Fitzgerald et al., 2021). 

On the one hand, relying on confidence is wise because confidence and accuracy are predictably related: confident witnesses are more likely to be accurate (e.g., Sporer et al., 1995; Wixted & Wells, 2017, but see Brewer et al., 2021). This relationship is obtained regardless of whether numerical ratings or verbal confidence statements are used (Smalarz et al., 2021). In addition, procedural safeguards, such as double-blind lineup administration, can reduce confidence in false identifications, thereby ensuring that it is easier to discern accuracy from confidence reports (Charman & Quiroz, 2016).  

On the other hand, identification confidence is malleable as a function of a host of outside influences.  Co-witnesses, for example, can affect witness confidence reports.  In one of the earliest demonstrations of this effect, Luus and Wells (1994) had witnesses view a live staged crime in pairs.  After the staged event, all witnesses viewed a target-absent photospread which ostensibly had already been shown to the other participant. After the participant made an identification decision, the experimenter revealed information about the other witness and then asked the participant to rate their own confidence on a scale from 1 (not at all confident) to 10 (very confident). When the experimenter indicated that the co-witness identified the same person as the participant, mean confidence increased to 8.8, compared with 6.9 in a no information control condition. When the co-witness apparently said the culprit was not in the photos, confidence ratings decreased significantly to 3.6 compared with the control condition.  

Scores of other variables can affect identification confidence without affecting accuracy. Some of these include post-identification feedback (Wells & Bradfield, 1998), interviewer expectations (Garrioch & Brimacombe, 2001), and filler similarity (e.g., Lucas et al., 2021). Mock jurors and other evaluators of eyewitness accuracy also use confidence in judgments of eyewitness accuracy (e.g., Slane & Dodson, 2021). However, evaluators are generally insensitive to indications that witnesses’ confidence was inflated between the identification procedure and their testimony at trial (i.e., confidence inflation, Douglass & Jones, 2013), especially if witnesses provide a reasonable explanation as to why their confidence was higher during testimony than it was at the time of the identification (Jones et al., 2008).  

Scientific Review Papers: Recommendations for Reform 

The centrality of eyewitness evidence to fair criminal investigations and prosecutions has twice prompted the American Psychology – Law Society to solicit a scientific review paper outlining the consensus among experts regarding psychological research on the topic. In 1998, the four recommendations for collecting eyewitness evidence were to use double-blind procedures, collect an immediate confidence report after an identification decision is made, ensure that the suspect does not stand out from fillers, and instruct witnesses that the culprit may or may not be present (Wells et al., 1998).   

In 2020, the AP-LS again solicited a reform-minded report on the state of eyewitness identification research. In the most recent scientific review paper, five recommendations were added to the original four: A pre-lineup interview should collect witness self-reports of the witnessed event, investigators should refrain from conducting an identification procedure without an evidence-based suspicion supporting the suspect’s guilt, the entire identification procedure and confidence statement should be video-recorded, repeated identification procedures should be avoided, and showups should be avoided (Wells et al., 2020). Many, but not all, of these recommendations are now applied in jurisdictions throughout the United States (e.g., Wells, 2020) and around the world (Fitzgerald et al., 2021). 

The Future of Eyewitness Identification Research 

In 1977, the U.S. Supreme Court justices dissenting in Manson v. Brathwaite (1977) argued that the “annals of criminal law are rife with instances of mistaken identification” but that it was “of course, impossible to control one source of such errors -- the faulty perceptions and unreliable memories of witnesses”.  The justices went on to argue that the only way to remedy these uncontrollable errors was through the tools available to attorneys in a criminal trial. Decades of research in applied social psychology have not supported the contention that the trial itself is the only safeguard available for wrongful convictions based on misidentifications. In contrast, concrete system variable changes outlined in the most recent scientific review paper on this topic identify the various points at which the system could intervene to protect the integrity of eyewitness evidence (Wells et al., 2020). Even so, much needs to be done to bolster eyewitness identification evidence.  

One strategy is to direct research toward reflector variables which reflect a witness’s accuracy (e.g., Wells, 2020).  These variables—also known as postdictors—can provide information about whether witnesses are accurate. The most relevant community to educate on these variables is probably law enforcement and prosecutors. These communities bear responsibility for deciding whether to proceed with an identification decision. If an erroneous decision is made at the early investigative stages, the potential for a cascade of contextual biasing effects makes it difficult to undo an earlier mistaken judgment to pursue a suspect (Charman et al., 2019). Exoneration cases suggest that by the time an eyewitness error makes it to a criminal trial, it is nearly impossible for an innocent defendant to mount a viable defense. 

Another direction for future research is to harness the benefits of technology in addressing scientific questions. Indeed, Law and Human Behavior recently published an entire issue on the interface of technology and criminal justice (DeMatteo & Cox, 2021). More narrowly connected to questions about eyewitness evidence, researchers have begun using virtual reality to more closely approximate a real witnessing scenario without violating ethical guidelines for how to treat research participants (e.g., Nyman et al., 2020).  Others have used computer simulations to understand witness decision behavior (Smith et al., 2022). Still others have examined the potential benefits of video-recorded rather than static lineups (e.g., Rubínová et al., 2021). 

The system variable changes discussed above are relatively minor tweaks to the current protocol for collecting eyewitness identification evidence: adjust instructions, video-record the identification procedure, ensure the procedure is double-blind, establish a reasonable suspicion standard, etc. More recently, Brewer and Doyle (2021) encouraged eyewitness researchers to consider testing methods for collecting eyewitness evidence that depart substantially from the traditional procedure by soliciting a series of “graded or probabilistic statements” instead of a categorical one involving a single decision (p. 184). In particular, on the basis of extensive empirical work conducted by Brewer and colleagues, they recommend using confidence judgments as a cue to accuracy by asking witnesses to provide confidence estimates for each photo presented to them rather than providing a singular confidence estimate after one photo has been selected. (For more details on this approach, see Brewer et al., 2020.)  

Some experts are optimistic about this novel procedure, while still expressing concern about some of its underlying assumptions (e.g., Steblay & Brooks, 2021). Should the approach outlined by Brewer and Doyle (2021)—or some other novel evidence-gathering mechanism—garner additional professional and empirical support, researchers will need to convince police, detectives, judges, and juries of the superiority of this new procedure. Some experts support such a change, but caution that it is only possible with restructured incentive systems to induce law enforcement to make changes (e.g., Newirth, 2021). Even though these challenges exist, productive collaborations between scientific and legal communities are certainly possible (e.g., Wells, 2020; Wells et al., 2000).   

Another topic that future research must address is social media. One relatively straightforward way social media might affect eyewitness identification performance is through exposure to a suspect (e.g., Havard et al., 2021). Here, effects similar to those found with other forms of prior exposure might be expected (e.g., Deffenbacher et al., 2006). More pernicious, though, is the opportunity for eyewitnesses to undertake independent investigations with the help of social media.  As just one example, consider a case in which a witness to a bar fight searched social media after the incident, looking through the Instagram account of an acquaintance whom she knew was also at the bar at the same time. Upon encountering a familiar face, she took it to the police and presented it as evidence against the individual (Douglass & Smalarz, 2019). These “investigations” are ripe with the potential for influence from post-event information, co-witness conversation, biased photos, and other contextual factors.    

Alibis: Eyewitnesses to Innocence 

“I was at dinner with my friend.” “I was on the subway heading to work.” “I was home watching a movie.” “I was at the gym.”  While investigating a crime, police might ask, or a suspect might volunteer, an alibi—and explanation as to their whereabouts at the time the crime was committed. An alibi should serve as protection for an innocent defendant, especially if it is corroborated by others.  Unfortunately, the potential for an alibi to substantiate innocence is limited for two reasons. First, people struggle to generate compelling alibis for their own past whereabouts at a specific time and place. In a novel demonstration of this point, researchers used a smartphone app to record data on 51 adult participants for a period of one month and assessed their memory one week after that period had expired. By comparing participants’ self-reported memories to time records and GPS locations, they found that 36% of all accounts were incorrect. Additional analyses suggested participants often confused hours across days and days across weeks (Laliberte et al., 2021). 

The second problem is that when a suspect’s alibi presentation is weak (e.g., “I was at home alone, sleeping”), prosecutors often interpret that nonevidence as indicative of guilt because of the assumptions that people should be able to generate accurate and compelling alibi evidence without difficulty (e.g., Olson & Charman, 2012) and that these alibis should remain consistent over time (e.g., Burke et al., 2007). Although people can sometimes generate support for their own alibis, this ability seems to vary as a function of time of day and day of the week. Moreover, people are generally unable to find physical evidence such as phone records or receipts that would support their alibis (e.g., Nieuwkamp et al., 2017).  

One reason that innocent people struggle to produce detailed alibis for specific time periods is because those time frames are often contemporaneously unremarkable. In one real case, an innocent defendant took the bus and went to work during the critical time window. Although the bus driver recognized the defendant as a regular passenger, he could not testify as to his presence on the bus on a specific day (as reported in Matuku & Charman, 2020).  One potential solution is to encourage people to recall prior events chronologically, thereby increasing the likelihood they will recall physical corroborating evidence (Matuku & Charman, 2020).  

Even when alibi witnesses are available to corroborate a suspect’s claim, often they are met with skepticism. In one case, Steven Avery spent 18 years in prison for sexual assault after he was identified by the victim. Avery was convicted even though he presented 16 alibi witnesses. One of the witnesses, a store clerk, should have been particularly compelling because there was no prior relationship incentivizing that person to lie on Avery’s behalf. Even so, charges against Avery were not dismissed until DNA evidence conclusively implicated another individual (https://innocenceproject.org/cases/steven-avery/). This case is not unique: Walter McMillian was also convicted in spite of multiple alibi witnesses testifying that he was at a church gathering during the crime for which he was convicted (https://eji.org/cases/walter-mcmillian/).   

A Taxonomy of Alibis 

Research on alibis began in earnest with the publication of a taxonomy of alibis (Olson & Wells, 2004). According to the taxonomy, the most believable alibis should be those with difficult-to-fabricate physical evidence (e.g., security videos) and corroboration from individuals familiar with the suspect, but not motivated to lie (i.e., “non-motivated familiar others,” p. 162). The least believable alibis should be those with neither physical evidence nor corroboration from others. Olson and Wells had people rate sample alibis from each level of their taxonomy. Ratings revealed support for the basic assumptions of the taxonomy with ratings of guilt likelihood being highest for alibi providers who had no corroborating evidence; it was lowest for those with difficult-to-fabricate physical evidence and corroboration from a nonmotivated familiar person. This basic set of presumptions is consistent with law enforcement beliefs about alibi believability (Dysart & Strange, 2012, see also e.g., Eastwood et al., 2020).  

One interesting finding from this taxonomy was that even the most believable alibi only produced a believability rating of 7.41 on a scale from 0 to 10. This alibi contained difficult-to-fabricate physical evidence and had a nonmotivated familiar corroborator. As the authors wrote, “asking for an alibi is more than just being inquisitive; it is a form of accusation regarding a bad act” (p. 174). Such an accusation might serve as an anchor from which it is difficult to shift assumptions of guilt (e.g., Koehler, 1991, as cited in Olson & Wells).   

The Malleability of Alibi Witnesses 

If an innocent suspect does have alibi witnesses, they are only helpful to the extent that they can vouch for the suspect and maintain that contention that they were not at the scene of the crime when it was committed. As with other aspects of human memory, however, alibi generation may be malleable in response to post-event information (Crozier et al., 2017).  

In an experiment inspired by actual cases in which alibis had retracted their willingness to vouch for defendants who were later wrongfully convicted , Marion et al. (2016) had participants complete mundane tasks in the same room as an experimental confederate who was separated from the participants by a portable partition. After the tasks were over, the experimenter accused the confederate of leaving the room during the experimental session, stealing money, and then returning.  The experimenter removed the confederate from the room for questioning and asked the participant whether that confederate was present during the whole session. Correctly, participants vouched for the confederate, who in fact, never left the testing room. Moment later, however, if told that the confederate had confessed, more than half of the participants reneged on their alibi support, and even fewer maintained that support when the experimenter implied that supporting the confederate made them look suspicious.  

Additional research is consistent with this result. In a followup study involving a similar paradigm, Kienzle and Levett (2018) replicated the basic effect when the confederate was a stranger but found that friends were more likely than strangers to corroborate the participant’s  alibi, maintain their belief in that participant’s innocence, and do so with confidence. In a related line of research, confession evidence altered non-alibi eyewitness identification decisions. In one study, 61% of witnesses to a staged but realistic crime in a classroom changed the lineup identification decisions they had initially made after learning that a different person than the one they identified had confessed (Hasel & Kassin, 2009).  

Police-Induced Confessions 

Throughout human history, confession evidence has proved to be common, potent, and persuasive as a matter of common sense. In his classic treatise on evidence, John Henry Wigmore (1904/1985) described confession, even when recanted, as the most potent evidence presentable in court. Other legal scholars have echoed this opinion. As one legal scholar stated, many years ago, “the introduction of a confession makes the other aspects of a trial in court superfluous” (McCormick, 1972). Alongside this long-standing assessment as to the potency of confession evidence, however, is the realization that confessions are fallible—sometimes reported secondhand by motivated police or informants, raising questions about their authenticity, and at other times extracted from a suspect through a high-pressured process of interrogation, raising questions about voluntariness and coercion.  

U.S. courts typically exclude a confession from evidence if it was extracted by physical force; deprivation of food, sleep, or other biological needs; explicit threats of punishment or harm; explicit promises of immunity or leniency; or without properly notifying suspects of their Miranda rights. As a result, the modern American police interrogation has become a psychologically oriented process of influence. (For an historical overview, see Leo, 2008; for uniquely social psychological perspectives, see Kassin, 2015). 

False Confessions: The Scope of the Problem 

The notion that individuals of sound mind would confess to crimes they did not commit is not intuitive. Still, history reveals numerous instances (e.g., Bedaut & Radelet, 1987; Borchard, 1932; Munsterberg, 1908). Although it is not possible to calculate a prevalence rate, two national databases provide informative data. The Innocence Project, founded in 1992, reports that false confessions by the exoneree or a codefendant had contributed to nearly 30% of the first 375 postconviction DNA exonerations in the United States—and doubles to 61% in the subsample of homicide cases (Garrett, 2011; www.innocenceproject.org/). The National Registry of Exonerations—a broader and more diverse U.S. database that has tracked over 3,500 exonerations from 1989 by all means and not just by DNA—reports that 13% of individuals wrongfully convicted had themselves confessed to crimes they did not commit. In this database as well, the false confessions rate climbs to 23% in homicide cases (https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/False-Confessions.aspx).  

Prevalence rates notwithstanding, it is useful to distinguish between three types of false confessions: voluntary, compliant, and internalized (Kassin, 1997; Kassin & Wrightsman, 1985; Wrightsman & Kassin, 1993). Voluntary false confessions arise when innocent people volunteer self-incriminating statements without pressure from police (often to high-profile crimes, as when 200 people volunteered false confessions to the 1932 kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s infant son). The other two types come about through the social influence processes of interrogation. Within the latter category, compliant false confessions occur when innocent people are moved from denial to confession in an act of mere behavioral compliance, to escape a stressful situation, and/or because they are led to believe that confession serves self-interest. In contrast, internalized false confessions occur when innocent people, rendered vulnerable and subjected to misinformation about the evidence, become confused, come to believe in their own guilt, and in some cases confabulate memories to support that false belief. (For descriptions of the process of internalization, see Gudjonsson, 2017; Kassin, 2007). This three-part taxonomy has provided a useful framework for the study of false confessions and has since been used, extended, and refined (e.g., see Gudjonsson, 2018; Kassin et al., 2010). 

Youth as a vulnerability

The stories behind the numbers are a varied lot. They involve men and women, juveniles and adults, and individuals of varying racial backgrounds throughout history and from countries all over the world. Still, not all demographic groups are equally vulnerable. Research shows that juveniles are disproportionately represented in the population of false confessions (Drizin & Leo, 2004; National Registry of Exonerations, 2022). The reasons are numerous. Early on, research showed that young adolescents do not comprehend their Miranda rights to silence and counsel, as measured by objective instruments (Grisso, 1981, 1998; Zelle, Romaine, & Goldstein, 2015). This Miranda research later morphed into a broader set of concerns. Field studies show that the vast majority of juvenile suspects are interrogated in the absence of defense counsel (August & Henderson, 2021; Feld, 2013). Moreover, the presence of parents—who are surprisingly ill informed about the process of interrogation, their children’s rights, and the legal consequences of waiving those rights—do not serve as a reliable safeguard (Cleary & Warner, 2017; Warner & Cleary, 2022; Woolard et al., 2008). 

These Miranda limitations are particularly troublesome because a consistent body of developmental research in both laboratory and real-life settings shows that adolescents are more malleable than adults, more vulnerable to manipulation, more compliant in the face of authority, more suggestible in response to misleading questions, and at greater risk of giving false confessions (Grisso et al., 2003; Redlich & Goodman, 2003). They also exhibit an “immaturity of judgment” that makes them short-term decision-makers, highly responsive to immediate rewards and punishments and susceptible to influence from external sources. Empirical evidence for the cognitive limitations of the juvenile mind is broad and pervasive (e.g., Cleary, 2017; Owen-Kostelnik et al. 2006; Steinberg, 2014). Hence, the National. Registry of Exonerations (NRE) database has shown that false confessions are found at a far higher rate among juvenile defendants in their sample than among adults.  

Racial bias

In September of 2022, the National Registry of Exonerations released a powerful report titled Race and Wrongful Convictions in the United States. African Americans comprise 13.6% of the U.S. population, and yet, according to this Report, a whopping 53% of the first 3,200 persons wrongfully convicted were Black (33% were White, 12% were Hispanic; https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/Race%20Report%20Preview.pdf). 

Race is a potent risk factor. However, there is little or no research indicating that African Americans are more vulnerable than White Americans  once they appear in the interrogation room. From a stereotype threat perspective, the problem may well begin with the fact that innocent African Americans are more likely to arouse suspicion in the first place because of their skin color and therefore more likely to get caught in the crosshairs of an aggressive police investigation (see Najdowski, 2011, 2023; Najdowski, Bottoms & Goff, 2015). Indeed, over the years, as illustrated by Allport and Postman’s (1947) demonstration of how racial stereotypes bias rumor transmission, laboratory experiments using the “dot-probe” method of planting subliminal images into a visual array (e.g., Eberhardt et al., 2004), shooting experiments (Correll et al., 2014), and other paradigms have demonstrated the often-implicit nature of racial prejudice.  Similarly, analyses of criminal justice archival data and field studies have shown that African Americans are subjected to stops and searches by police at rates disproportionate to their number in the population and to their rate of offending. As suggested by other chapters in this volume, racial profiling in the criminal justice system is widespread (for overviews, see Banaji & Greenwald, 2013; Eberhardt, 2019).   

In a study of more proximate relevance to the point that racial profiling may contribute to the disproportionate number of African Americans wrongfully convicted, Eberhardt and others analyzed 28,000 traffic stops and found that 60% involved black motorists, even though they constituted only 28% of the city’s population. (These motorists were also more likely to be searched and handcuffed.) The tone of these stops also differed as a function of race, as police routinely used less respectful language when speaking to black motorists (Camp et al., 2021; Voigt et al., 2017). This sort of racial bias is not limited to adults. In a series of experiments, Goff et al. (2014) compared adult perceptions of varying-aged boys and found that people judged Black boys to be older than less childlike than their same-aged White peers (also see Perillo et al., 2023). In short, basic research on stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination may well explain racial disparities in wrongful convictions, including those involving false confessions.   

Methodologies and consensus

Before addressing research on confessions, we should comment on the diversity of methodologies that are used. One approach has involved a focus on aggregations of individual cases based on archived records. Other empirical methods have included naturalistic observations of live and videotaped police interrogations, self-report surveys and interviews that purport to describe normative practices and beliefs, correlational studies that link various personal suspect characteristics and the tendency to confess, controlled experiments in laboratory and field settings that are designed to assess police judgments of truth and deception, the effects of certain interrogation tactics on true and false confession rates, and the impact that confessions have on judges, juries, lay witnesses, and forensic examiners.  

It is also important to note that the research literature on false confessions is now sufficiently mature and has served as the basis of an official Scientific Review Paper (SRP) of the American Psychology-Law Society, a.k.a. Division 41 of the APA (Kassin et al., 2010; for a description of the vetting process, see Thompson, 2010; for a fully updated SRP 2.0, see Kassin et al., 2025). With this document serving as a template, the American Psychological Association has filed twelve amicus briefs on the subject of false confessions and has adopted two resolutions, in 2014 and 2022, on the interrogation of criminal suspects. A recent survey of 87 Ph.D. confession experts worldwide has shown that the findings we report in this chapter elicit high levels of agreement within the scientific community (Kassin et al., 2018).   

The Pre-Interrogation Interview: Judgments of Truth and Deception 

Although some individuals are more vulnerable to false confessions than others, the bulk of the phenomenon is driven by social-cognitive biases and by influence tactics that affect all human beings, regardless of their inherent vulnerability. These tactics resemble the kinds of manipulations seen in classic social psychology experiments. In the United States, the most common approach to interrogation is known as the Reid technique, founded in Chicago by Fred Inbau and John Reid, and codified in the text Criminal Interrogations and Confessions (Inbau & Reid, 1962; for the most recent edition, see Inbau et al., 2013). Within this approach, investigators are trained to (1) conduct a non-confrontational interview to assess whether a suspect is truthful or deceptive, and (2) if deemed deceptive, commence an accusatory interrogation aimed at getting that suspect to make an admission of guilt followed by a full narrative confession. Over the years, social psychological research has directly and indirectly addressed both processes. 

The main purpose of the non-accusatory pre-interrogation interview is to help determine if the suspect is truthful or deceptive, and/or innocent or guilty. To do so, Inbau et al. (2013) provide investigators with a list of presumably diagnostic questions (e.g., “What do you think should happen to the person who did this?”) and then instruct them to detect lies by observing changes in the suspect’s verbal and nonverbal behavior (e.g., eye movements, postural shifts, self-grooming, fidgeting). They suggest that training in the Reid technique produces an exceedingly high level of accuracy. Yet, this claim is based on allusions to personal experience and data from a single highly-flawed study (Horvath et al., 1994; for a critique, see Kassin, 2006).  

There are two reasons for skepticism about these human lie detection claims. First, basic social perception research in other venues has shown that most of the demeanor cues touted by the Reid technique, presumed to reveal nervousness and other emotions, do not significantly discriminate between truth-telling and deception—and for those cues that do, the estimated effect sizes are small by conventional standards. (For a comprehensive meta-analysis of 116 studies, see DePaulo et al., 2003). It is clear that the presumed nonverbal cues to deceit are faint and unreliable, leading perceivers who rely on these cues to exhibit low rates of accuracy. Hence, research shows that on average, laypeople are only 54% accurate; that training seldom produces appreciable improvement compared to naive control groups; and that police, judges, psychiatrists, customs inspectors, and other so-called experts perform only slightly better, if at all. (For reviews, see Bond & DePaulo, 2006; Hartwig & Bond, 2011; Luke, 2019; Vrij et al., 2019). After testing over 12,000 lie detection professionals, O’Sullivan and Ekman (2004) identified 29 “wizards” who exhibited better-than-chance performance on multiple tests. However, some researchers were quick to note that these instances were statistical flukes (Bond & DePaulo, 2008; Bond & Uysal, 2007); others failed to find similarly reliable individual differences (Leach et al., 2009). 

Second, evaluations of the Reid technique in a criminal justice context have not produced impressive results. Vrij, Mann, and Fisher (2006) had some participants (but not others) commit a mock crime that they were motivated to deny. All participants were then interviewed using the Reid technique. Responses to the suggested “behavior provoking” questions did not significantly distinguish between truth tellers and liars in the predicted manner. There is also no evidence that the verbal and nonverbal cues alleged to be diagnostic can reliably differentiate between liars and truth tellers. For example, Kassin and Fong (1999) trained some participants but not others in the Reid technique, after which they watched videotaped interviews of mock suspects, some of whom committed one of four mock crimes, and others of whom did not. Upon questioning, all suspects denied their involvement. Observers could not reliably differentiate between the two groups of suspects. In fact, those who underwent training were significantly less accurate, more confident, and more biased toward seeing deception than those who did not undergo training. Using these same taped interviews, Meissner and Kassin (2002) found that experienced police detectives exhibited these same tendencies. Other research confirms this pattern (e.g., Garrido et al., 2004) and shows that the behavioral cues that Reid-trained police use merely codify commonsense misconceptions (Masip et al., 2011). 

Throughout history, people have assumed that the way to spot a liar is to watch for outward signs of nervousness and emotionality in their behavior. In a police interrogation room, however, even innocent truth tellers may show signs of stress. In light of such misconceptions, Anders Granhag, Aldert Vrij, and others have sought to improve lie detection accuracy by developing cognitive interviewing strategies aimed at “outsmarting liars” (Granhag, Vrij, & Verschuere, 2015; Vrij, Granhag, & Porter, 2011). 

Two lines of research in particular have proved promising in this regard. One approach is based on the fact that lying requires more effort than telling the truth. Vrij, Fisher, Mann, and Leal (2006) theorized that interviewers should tax a suspect’s cognitive resources and attend to cues that betray effort. In one study, interviewers had truth tellers and liars recount their stories in reverse chronological order and found that observers became more accurate in their ability to distinguish between the truthful and deceptive accounts (Vrij et al., 2008). In another study, researchers found that forcing suspects to maintain eye contact during the interview, which proved effortful, likewise impaired liars more than truth tellers and increased observers’ accuracy (Vrij et al., 2010). Recent meta-analyses have suggested that cognitive lie detection (i.e., imposing cognitive load, encouraging interviewees to say more, and asking unexpected questions) improved overall truth and lie detection compared to the standard approach (e.g., MacGiolla & Luke, 2021; Vrij et al., 2017). 

A second promising technique involves the “strategic use of evidence” (SUE). This approach is based on the fact that if police refrain from disclosing their evidence, the guilty suspect will risk making statements that are inconsistent with it, thereby getting trapped in a discernible lie (e.g., claiming never to have visited a location at which his or her fingerprints were found). In the first SUE study, Hartwig et al. (2005) had participants commit a mock theft or a non-criminal act and were then interviewed about the event. The interviewers conducted either a standard interview in which evidence against the “suspect” was disclosed at the outset or they withheld disclosure until later in the interview. Results showed that observers were later more accurate in distinguishing truth and deception when they saw SUE interviews than when they saw standard early disclosure interviews (61.7% vs. 42.9%). Additional research has produced similar results (Hartwig et al., 2006; Tekin et al., 2015).  

Finally, there are two important points to make about this research on pre-interrogation judgments of truth and deception. First, proponents of the Reid technique have argued that laboratory experiments lack external validity because they often involve college student participants in a low-stakes situation (Buckley, 2012). In a meta-analysis of studies spanning over 40 years, however, Hartwig and Bond (2014) found that the detectability of deception did not differ as a function of whether the speaker was a college student or nonstudent, whether the speaker’s motivation level was high or low, or whether the speaker lied in a monologue or in a question-and-answer interview. Second, with regard to interrogations and confessions, the overall pattern of findings—that investigators lack accuracy despite high levels of confidence, and exhibit a bias toward seeing deception—suggests that police are prone to interrogate some unknown number of innocent suspects from a guilt-presumptive mindset, as embodied in the assertion that “we don’t interrogate innocent people” (Kassin, 2022, p. 55).  Hence, this approach may lead police to presume guilt, which increases the tendency to target innocent people for investigation (Yang et al., 2023), thereby increasing the ultimate risk of false confessions (Moody et al., 2023).   

Interrogation: The Problem of False Confessions 

Police using the Reid technique and other accusatorial approaches are advised to isolate the suspect in a small, private, windowless room, without a friend or family member present, which increases anxiety and, hence, the motive to escape. A nine-step process then ensues involving the interplay of negative and positive incentives. On the one hand, the interrogator confronts the suspect with accusations of guilt, assertions that are made with certainty and bolstered by evidence, real or manufactured. All objections and denials are rejected. On the other hand, the interrogator offers sympathy and moral justification, introducing “themes” that morally justify, excuse, or minimize the crime and lead suspects to see confession as an expedient means of escape. The use of these techniques in practice has been documented in aggregated case studies (Drizin & Leo, 2004), naturalistic observational studies (Cleary, 2014; Feld, 2013; Kelly et al., 2016; King & Snook, 2009; Leo, 1996a, 1996b), experiments in which police interrogate mock suspects (e.g., Kassin et al., 2014, 2017), fully randomized field experiments involving real interrogations (Kassin et al., 2019), and national surveys of law enforcement officers (Cleary & Warner, 2016; Kassin et al., 2007; Kostelnik & Reppucci, 2009).  

Structural aspects of interrogation

Two structural aspects of a typical police interrogation are striking from a social-psychological standpoint. The first concerns the fact that interrogation is, by definition, a guilt-presumptive process—a theory-driven social interaction led by an authority figure who has formed a strong belief about the suspect and single-mindedly measures success by whether they are able to extract a confession. The guilt-presumption that accompanies the start of interrogation thus provides fertile ground for the operation of cognitive and behavioral confirmation biases. In a study modeled after Snyder and Swann’s (1978) classic biased hypothesis-testing experiment, Kassin, Goldstein, and Savitsky (2003) had some participants (but not others) commit a mock crime, after which all were questioned by participant interrogators who were led to presume either guilt or innocence. As predicted, interrogators who presumed guilt asked more incriminating questions, conducted more coercive interrogations, and tried harder to get the suspect to confess. In turn, this more aggressive style made the suspects sound defensive and led observers who later listened to the tapes judge even those who were innocent as guilty. Follow-up research has confirmed this chain of events in suspect interviews (Hill, Memon, & McGeorge, 2008; Narchet, Meissner, & Russano, 2011; for a study involving 60 police officers in Uppsala, Sweden, see Lidén et al., 2018). 

A second striking feature of interrogation concerns the “Milgramesque” nature of the situation itself. In Milgram’s (1963) classic paradigm, the first of 18 such experiments, 65% of participants obeyed an experimenter’s directions to deliver increasingly painful electric shocks to a confederate. (For overviews, see Blass, 2004; Milgram, 1974; Miller, 1986; Perry, 2013). There are many parallels between Milgram’s protocol and modern-day police interrogations. In both, the subject is alone, without social support, in a specially designed space, whether the laboratory or an interrogation room. In both venues, the subject is confronted by a figure of authority—a psychology experimenter or a detective; the subject then engages a contractual agreement to proceed by volunteering and receiving payment before participating in Milgram’s study or by signing a waiver of Miranda rights in the interrogation setting.  

At that point, in these similarly structured situations, the authority figure uses deception to reframe the purposes and consequences of the subject’s actions. In Milgram’s experiments, participants were led to believe that the objective was to test the effects of punishment on a learner through the administration of shocks that may be painful but not harmful. In an interrogation, suspects are led to believe that confession serves their personal self-interest better than denial does. In both venues, the authority figure then proceeds to make a series of unwavering and relentless demands, unwilling to take no for an answer. Milgram used four scripted prompts and prods (ranging from “Please continue” to “You have no other choice, you must go on”); the Reid technique offers a series of nine steps (opening with the “positive confrontation” and culminating in “converting the oral admission into a written confession”). In both cases, full obedience is achieved by eliciting gradually escalating acts of compliance, culminating in 450V in Milgram’s study, and, of course, a full narrative confession in the interrogation room. (For a more detailed comparison, see Kassin, 2015, 2022). 

False confession as a decision-making dilemma 

Why would anyone, guilty or innocent, confess to police? Research on human decision-making has shown that people make choices that they think will maximize their well-being given the constraints they face (Herrnstein et al., 1997). This research also shows that people tend to be impulsive in their orientation, preferring rewards that are immediate rather than delayed, with delayed rewards depreciating in their subjective value over time (Rachlin, 2000). Although children and adolescents exhibit greater temporal discounting than adults, this tendency is found throughout adulthood (Seaman, 2022).  

In this context, it is easy to appreciate the power of interrogation, which is explicitly designed to increase the anxiety associated with denial and decrease the anxiety associated with confession, thereby making it easier for the suspect to make the decision to confess. Recent laboratory research demonstrates this point. Madon et al. (2012) asked participants to report on whether they had ever committed 20 criminal and unethical acts of misconduct. In one condition, participants faced a short-term negative consequence for each denial of misconduct (having to answer repetitive questions) but risked a larger, long-term consequence for admissions of misconduct (having to discuss their responses with a police officer at a later date). Given the choice, participants exhibited a tendency to admit misconduct to avoid the short-term consequence of denial, even as doing so increased the risk of the larger, long-term consequence. 

This tendency toward short-sighted decision-making has been used to characterize what suspects face in a police interrogation setting and can be exacerbated by a number of factors, such as the expected length of an interrogation (Madon et al., 2013), being sleep deprived (Frenda et al., 2016), or being questioned during “off-peak” periods of alertness (Scherr et al., 2014) or while otherwise fatigued and unable to self-regulate (Davis & Leo, 2012). (For an overview of interrogation decision-making and the factors that influence it see Yang et al., 2017; also see Yang et al., 2015, 2019).  

Situational risk factor: the false evidence ploy

It is clear that some individuals are uniquely vulnerable to confessing despite their innocence (e.g., juveniles, and adults with intellectual limitations, mental health problems, or a history of trauma; for an overview, see Gudjonsson, 2018). Turning from individual differences to situational factors that increase the risk, research has focused on two common tactics, the first of which concerns the presentation of false evidence. Many Americans do not know that police in the U.S. are permitted by law to lie to the suspects they interrogate about evidence in pursuit of a confession. In Frazier v Cupp (1969), the Supreme Court ruled it lawful for police to present false evidence. “Your hair was found in the victim’s grasp,” “You failed the polygraph,” “Your fingerprints were on the knife,” “Surveillance footage shows you were there,” and “Your friend said she wasn’t with you like you said” are some brazen but common examples. There is almost no limit to the type or magnitude of deception permitted. 

Psychology offers ample proof of the risk posed by false evidence. Across a range of non-forensic domains, research shows that misinformation renders people vulnerable to manipulation. Over the years, experiments have shown that false information—presented by confederates, counterfeit test results, bogus norms, false physiological feedback, and the like—can substantially alter a subject’s visual judgements (Asch, 1956; Sherif, 1936), beliefs (Anderson, Lepper, & Ross, 1980), social perceptions (Tajfel et al., 1971), behaviors towards other people (Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968), emotional states (Schachter & Singer, 1962), self-assessments (Crocker et al., 1991), memories for observed and autobiographical events (Loftus, 2005), ‘memory blindness’ for one’s own past feelings (Urban et al., 2019), and even certain medical outcomes, as seen in the classic placebo effect (Benedetti, 2021). 

Numerous laboratory experiments demonstrate the false evidence effect in contexts that mimic interrogations. In the first paradigm devised for eliciting false confessions, Kassin and Kiechel (1996) accused college students typing on a keyboard of causing the computer to crash by pressing a key they had been instructed to avoid. Despite their innocence and initial denials, participants were asked to sign a confession. In some sessions (but not others), a confederate said she witnessed the subject hit the forbidden key. This manipulation increased the number of students who signed a confession from 48% to 94%. A subsample of those who confessed also went on to internalize the belief in their own culpability. 

Using this paradigm, follow-up studies replicated the false evidence effect to varying degrees even when the false evidence manipulation consisted of a mere nonspecific bluff (Perillo & Kassin, 2011) or was said to bear a financial consequence (Horselenberg et al., 2003), and especially among vulnerable populations such as children and juveniles (Candel et al., 2005; Redlich & Goodman, 2003) and sleep-deprived adults (Frenda et al., 2016). This effect has also been produced using vastly different methods, leading innocent participants to confess to cheating, in violation of a university honor code (Perillo & Kassin, 2011); stealing money from the ‘bank’ in a computerized gambling experiment (Nash & Wade, 2009; Wright et al., 2013); and recalling past transgressions, including acts of violence (Shaw & Porter, 2015; also see Wade et al., 2018; for a meta-analysis of confession experiments, see Stewart et al., 2018); for a meta-analysis of experiments specifically demonstrating that false evidence increases the risk of false confession, see Catlin et al., 2023).  

Contradicting the Supreme Court’s ruling in Frazier, there is little doubt as to the risk inherent in the presentation of false evidence. In 2010, the American Psychology-Law Society published a White Paper that addressed this issue and reflected the opinion of its members (Kassin et al., 2010). Shortly thereafter, the American Psychological Association (2014) passed a resolution warning of “the risks of eliciting a false confession by interrogations that involve the presentation of false evidence” (APA reaffirmed this position in 2022).  In a recent survey of 87 Ph.D. confession experts worldwide, 94% endorsed as highly reliable the proposition that “Presentations of false incriminating evidence during interrogation increase the risk that an innocent suspect would confess,” while 100% endorsed the statement “Misinformation about an event can alter a person’s memory for that event.” Research confirming the false evidence effect is broad, pervasive, and widely accepted (Kassin et al., 2018). 

Situational risk factor: minimization themes

A second interrogation tactic that increases the risk of false confession concerns the use of minimization. Precipitated by feigned sympathy, a detective may downplay the moral seriousness of an offense by suggesting that the now-beleaguered suspect’s actions were spontaneous, accidental, provoked, seduced, peer-pressured, alcohol- or drug-induced, caused by stress or raging hormones, or otherwise justifiable by external factors. At times, detectives not only “minimize” the crime but “normalize” what they allege the suspect did by suggesting that they would have behaved in the same way. Recognizing the obvious risk to innocent people, U.S. courts over the years have ruled to exclude confessions extracted from a suspect not only by direct threats of harm or punishment but also by promises of leniency or immunity from prosecution (Bram v. United States, 1898).  

But what about the more nuanced use of minimization tactics through which promises unspoken may be implied? Research has shown that when people read or hear someone speak, they tend to process information “between the lines,” fill in the gaps, and recall not what was stated in words but what was pragmatically implied (Chan & McDermott, 2006; Harris & Monaco, 1978). In light of this, Kassin and McNall (1991) had participants read transcripts of suspect interrogations. In each case, three versions were produced in which the detective: (1) made a conditional promise of leniency, (2) used minimization tactics, or (3) used neither technique. Participants read one version and estimated the severity of punishment they thought would be imposed on the suspect upon confession. The result? Minimization tactics led people to infer by pragmatic implication that leniency in sentencing would follow from confession—as if an explicit promise had been made. 

This basic effect has been replicated. Horgan et al. (2012) found that minimization tactics, even in the absence of a direct promise, induce accused laboratory participants to view the potential consequences of confessing as less severe. In six experiments, Luke and Alceste (2020) presented online participants with an interrogation transcript in which the suspect was promised leniency outright, subjected to minimization themes, or merely questioned about the evidence. Across studies, moral minimization led participants to view the crime as less severe, which in turn reduced sentencing expectations without leading them to believe that the interrogator had made a direct promise of leniency. Indeed, this pragmatic implication has also been demonstrated among juvenile participants (Redlich et al., 2020). 

Other research has shown that minimization not only communicates leniency but also facilitates the innocent person’s decision to confess. For example, Russano et al. (2005) devised the now-popular “cheating paradigm” that enabled them to manipulate factual guilt and innocence as well as the tactics used to elicit a confession. In this study, participants in a problem-solving study were paired with a confederate who induced some participants (but not others) to cheat. A suspicious experimenter then returned, separated the partners, accused the participant of cheating and sought to get a signed confession either by overtly promising leniency, by making minimizing remarks, by using both tactics, or by using no tactics. Overall, the confession rate was higher among guilty participants than innocent, when leniency was promised than when it was not, and when minimization was used than when it was not. Paralleling the effects of an explicit promise of leniency, minimization increased not only the rate of true confessions but increased even more so the rate of false confessions. As one might expect, minimization effects are particularly potent when administered by an experimenter who had established a rapport with the participant (Vallano et al., 2022).  

The phenomenology of innocence 

Common sense would suggest that factual innocence is the great deterrent to a false confession. In fact, anecdotal self-reports from those wrongfully convicted (e.g., exonerees who said they waived their Miranda rights because they did nothing wrong and did not need a lawyer), inspired a series of experiments that formed the basis for the paradoxical hypothesis that innocence can put innocents at risk (Kassin, 2005). This mental state may be rooted in a generalized belief in a just world (Lerner, 1980) and/or in the illusion of transparency by which people overestimate the extent to which their true status can be seen by others (Gilovich et al., 1998; Savitsky & Gilovich, 2003).  

In an initial test of this hypothesis, Kassin and Norwick (2004) conducted a laboratory experiment in which some participants (but not others) committed a mock theft of $100, after which they were apprehended and confronted by a neutral, sympathetic, or hostile investigator seeking a Miranda waiver to commence interrogation. Overall, those who were innocent were substantially more likely to sign a waiver than those who were guilty (81% vs. 36%). This decision-making tendency was so strong that two-thirds of innocents signed the waiver even when confronted by an investigator who appeared hostile and closed minded. When asked to explain this decision, most innocent suspects said they signed the waiver precisely because they were innocent (e.g., “I did nothing wrong;” “I had nothing to hide;” “He’ll see I didn’t do it”).  

Other researchers later obtained similar results. In one study, the basic finding was replicated with a Canadian sample (Moore & Gagnier, 2008). In a second study, the waiver rate was particularly pronounced among innocents who believed that the world was fair and just (Scherr et al., 2016). In a third study, innocent participants were more likely to waive their rights—relative to those who were guilty—when they understood the waiver decision than when they found it more confusing (Scherr et al., 2018). Still other research has shown that innocent people do not use self-presentation strategies when interviewed by police (Hartwig et al., 2005); that they provide alibi stories freely, without regard for the fact that police would view minor inaccuracies with suspicion (Olson & Charman, 2012); and that they become less physiologically aroused and self-report less stress in response to an accusation and the processes of interrogation because they trust that their innocence will prevail (Guyll et al., 2013; Madon et al., 2017; Normile & Scherr, 2018; Scherr & Franks, 2015). 

The phenomenology of innocence can even lead innocent people to confess. In a series of experiments, Perillo and Kassin (2011) examined the relatively benign bluff technique by which interrogators pretend to have evidence without further claiming that it implicates the suspect (e.g., stating that biological materials were collected and sent for testing). Theory underlying the bluff is simple: Fearing the evidence to be processed, perpetrators will succumb to pressure and confess; not fearing that alleged evidence, innocents would not succumb and confess. Yet in two experiments, Perillo and Kassin found that innocent participants were substantially more likely to confess to pressing a forbidden key, causing a computer to crash, when told that their keystrokes had been recorded for later review. In a third experiment, they were more likely to confess to willful cheating when told that a surveillance camera had taped their session, awaiting subsequent observation. Afterward, these participants consistently stated that the bluffed camera offered an assurance of future exoneration, which paradoxically made it easier to confess. 

Miranda: an effective safeguard? 

Most Western democracies recognize the right to remain silent and embody that right through warning-and-waiver requirements adapted from the US Supreme Court 1966 opinion in Miranda v. Arizona (Weisselberg, 2017). In that opinion, the Court ruled that police must inform suspects who are in custody of their constitutional rights to silence and counsel. Aimed at protecting citizens from the “inherently compelling pressures” of an American-style police interrogation, the Court offered a remedy: Any statement taken from a suspect in custody without a knowing, intelligent, and voluntary waiver of these rights would be considered unlawful and hence inadmissible at trial. One year later, In re Gault (1967) extended these rights to youths appearing in juvenile court. 

Although law enforcement opposition to Miranda was fierce at the time, and despite the Court’s objectives, the promise of a safeguard has not been fulfilled. Subsequent court rulings have narrowed the protections to such an extent that legal scholars no longer see it as protective (e.g., Kamisar, 2017; Weisselberg, 2017; White, 2001). Also problematic is that the Court had ruled that police must Mirandize only those suspects who are “in custody” and hence are not free to leave. That is more easily said than ruled on. Over the years, judges have struggled to define what the essentially psychological construct “free to leave” means and what constitutes a state of custody versus freedom to leave. Although no comprehensive list of objective criteria exists, the courts have cited as relevant whether police explicitly advised suspects that they were free to leave, whether the suspect’s freedom of movement was restrained, and whether coercive interrogation tactics were used. With these types of factors as a guide, police officers make real-time determinations as to how a reasonable, average person would perceive the situation. 

Recent research confirms the subjective nature of custody. In the first study of this topic, Alceste et al. (2018) conducted a two-phased experiment to compare actors and observers in their perceptions of custody versus freedom. In Phase 1, student participants were in the waiting room of a laboratory when a confederate “discovered” that her wallet was missing and filed a report with campus security, which brought a guard into the laboratory to investigate. Some participants were gently interviewed as witnesses might be; others were interrogated in an accusatory manner as suspects.  Afterward, participants were questioned about the experience. In Phase 2, observers watched a single interview or interrogation, after which they judged whether the suspect felt free to leave the situation.  Across questioning conditions, results showed that a majority of Phase 1 actors reported that they were in custody—even in the benign interview condition in which observers saw them as free to leave. In fact, a follow-up study showed that this pattern persisted even when the interviewer explicitly advised participant suspects that they were free to leave, and the participants knew it. Further pointing to the subjective nature of these judgments, a recent vignettes study showed that police and judges tend to see these situations as less custodial than social psychologists and laypeople do (Alceste & Kassin, 2021).  

In addition to these definitional problems, research has shown that police in custodial situations routinely use social influence techniques (e.g., reciprocity, foot-in-the-door) designed to elicit waivers, which may explain the facts that: (1) 80% or more of adult suspects waive their rights (Leo, 1996; Scherr & Madon, 2012); (2) that some people—notably young adolescents and cognitively impaired adults—do not comprehend the warnings (e.g., Grisso, 1981; Zelle, Romaine, & Goldstein, 2015; for findings mirrored by eye-tracking methodologies, see Scherr, Agauas, & Ashby, 2016); (3) that the content, format, and language of these warnings vary across jurisdictions, resulting in disparities in difficulty level (e.g., Rogers et al., 2007); and (4) that situational stress can impair comprehension even further (Rogers et al., 2011; Scherr & Madon, 2012). Add to these problems the fact that the phenomenology of innocence leads innocent people in particular to waive their rights (e.g., Norwick & Kassin, 2004; Moore & Gagnier, 2008), and it is clear that empirical research casts serious doubt on the protective adequacy of Miranda (for an overview, see Smalarz et al., 2016). 

The Potency of Confession Evidence in Court  

When a suspect recants a confession, pleads not guilty, and goes to trial, a judge determines whether the confession was voluntary and hence admissible as evidence. Presented with the  admissible confession, the jury then determines whether the defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. But are people discriminating judges of confessions? The growing archives of wrongful convictions involving innocent confessors, accompanied by controlled studies, suggest a negative answer to this question. Research shows that people cannot reliably distinguish between true and false confessions. Kassin, Meissner, and Norwick (2005) had male prison inmates, in counterbalanced order, give both a true narrative confession to the crime for which they were incarcerated and a false confession to a crime they did not commit. Presented with the resulting videotape of 10 confessions that were known to be either true or false, neither college students nor police investigators exhibited significant accuracy, though police were more confident in their judgments. This result was later replicated in studies involving the true and false confessions of juvenile detainees (Honts et al., 2014; Honts et al., 2019).  

Mock jury experiments show further that confession evidence has a substantial impact on judgments of guilt—a greater impact, for example, than eyewitness and character testimony (Kassin & Neumann, 1997). In fact, people do not adequately discount confession evidence even when the confessions are perceived to have been coerced by police (Kassin & Wrightsman, 1981; Kassin & Sukel, 1997); even after learning that police lied to the suspect about the evidence, a tactic they saw as coercive (Woody et al., 2018); even when told that the defendant suffered from a mental illness or was under duress (Henkel, 2008); even when the defendant was a juvenile (Redlich, Ghetti, & Quas, 2008); even when the confession was contradicted by exculpatory DNA (Appleby & Kassin, 2016); and even when the defendant’s confession was reported only secondhand by an informant who was motivated to lie (Neuschatz et al., 2008; Wetmore et al., 2014; 2020). Indeed, the incentivized snitch is a “dirty little secret” found in numerous wrongful convictions. (For comprehensive overviews of the problem and their persuasive power in court, see Natapoff, 2009; Neuschatz & Golding, 2022).  

There are two reasons why confession evidence is so potent. The first relates to general mechanisms of social cognition—for example, the fact that people tend to reflexively accept new assertions, often without scrutiny (Gilbert, 1991). This tendency manifests itself in two confession-relevant literatures. In one, as noted earlier, research has shown that  people exhibit a truth bias that contributes to poor performance at detecting deception (Bond & DePaulo, 2006; Levine et al., 1999). In a second, the domain of attribution, this tendency is also demonstrated by research showing that social perceivers routinely commit the fundamental attribution error, or correspondence bias—that is, they tend to make dispositional attributions for other people’s actions while underestimating the role of situational factors (Gilbert & Malone, 1995; Jones, 1990; Ross, 1977; 2018). Even when people recognize the coerciveness of an interrogation, they continue to infer guilt from confession. This bias appeared in bold form in a study involving 132 judges who voted to convict on the basis of a highly pressured confession that they perceived to be coerced (Wallace & Kassin, 2012). The common sense of confession is particularly problematic for the innocent confessor. In addition to the tendency to accept new information and underestimate the causal role of situation factors, people have a strong tendency in attribution—as noted by Heider (1958), Jones and Davis (1965), and others—to especially trust statements against self-interest. Hence, it is not surprising that people are far more likely to believe a suspect’s admissions of guilt than their denials (Levine et al., 2010). 

There is a second important reason why confessions carry so much decision-making weight, even when they are false: They contain not only an admission of guilt but also a full narrative account of who, what, when, where, and even why—details and all. Analyzing 38 proven false confessions from the Innocence Project’s data base of DNA exonerations, Garrett (2010) found that a striking 95% contained accurate (often precisely so) and vivid details about the crime that were not in the public domain. Often the prosecution featured these details at trial, suggesting that they could only have been known by the perpetrator. The confessors in these cases were innocent, so they could not have possessed firsthand guilty knowledge. (For a subsequent analysis of 66 cases yielding the same result, see Garrett, 2015). Thus, it appears that police had purposefully or inadvertently communicated these details, thereby “contaminating” these false confessions through direct references to crime facts, leading questions, exposure to photographs, and other secondary sources. (For a first-hand law enforcement account of how this occurred in an actual case, see Trainum, 2014; for a laboratory demonstration of contamination, see Alceste et al., 2020). 

To further complicate matters, Appleby et al. (2013) content-analyzed 20 confessions that were later proven false and found that many of them contained not only vivid sensory details about the crime, but also statements about the confessor’s motivation, assertions that the confession was voluntary, corrected errors, introspections, apologies, and expressions of remorse. “This is my first rape, and it’s going to be my last,” said Korey Wise (a false confession exoneree from New York City’s infamous Central Park jogger case), on camera, in 1989 (Kassin, 2002). Consistent with research indicating the persuasive power of “a few minor details” (e.g., Bell & Loftus, 1989), many false confessions thus contain the kinds of substantive cues that inflate perceptions of their credibility—and of the confessor’s guilt (Appleby et al., 2013).  

Finally, confessions are so potent that they can corrupt other evidence, such as eyewitness accounts (Hasel & Kassin, 2009), alibis (Marion et al., 2016), and forensic examinations (Kassin, Dror, & Kukucka, 2013). Analysis of Innocence Project case files revealed that 78% of false confessions were “corroborated” by one or two other evidence errors, which were typically obtained after the confession (Kassin, Bogart & Kerner, 2012). For these reasons, research indicates that confessions often trump DNA and other forms of exculpatory evidence innocence (Kassin, 2012). The net result is a cascade of effects, from interrogation through conviction and beyond, as confession impedes exoneration (Scherr & Normile, 2022; for an overview of these effects, resulting in a “cumulative disadvantage”, see Scherr et al. 2020). 

Science-Based Reforms to Policy and Practice 

 Having identified the problems with the status quo, many researchers have gone on to test alternative procedures aimed at eliciting confessions that are more diagnostic of guilt and increasing the accuracy of factfinders tasked with judging voluntariness and guilt. Three categories of proposals have dominated the literature in recent years.  

The first is to mandate the recording of all suspect interviews and interrogations, from start to finish and without exception. In 2010, authors of the American Psychology-Law Society Scientific Review paper on confessions proposed this most important remedy: “Without equivocation, our most essential recommendation is to lift the veil of secrecy from the interrogation process in favor of the principle of transparency. Specifically, all custodial interviews and interrogations of felony suspects should be videotaped in their entirety and with a camera angle that focuses equally on the suspect and interrogator” (Kassin et al., 2010, p. 25). This proposal was hardly new, yet, only nine states at the time imposed this requirement. Marking progress, 30 states now have a recording requirement, but even in these states the laws contain loopholes that excuse the failure to do so (e.g., the suspect was not in custody, or refused; the equipment malfunctioned or was not available; see Kassin & Thompson, 2019). 

From a systemic-justice perspective, two arguments support the call for full transparency. The first is that the presence of a camera will dissuade police from deploying their most coercive tactics. Supporting this hypothesis, a recent field study in which experienced police officers were covertly recorded as they interrogated mock suspects revealed that they used fewer controversial techniques when pre-informed that the sessions would be recorded than when not pre-informed (Kassin et al., 2014). The second major argument for recording is that it preserves an accurate and objective memorial account of the process. In a two-phased field experiment, 16 experienced police officers interrogated two suspects, after which they submitted an incident report. All sessions were covertly recorded. Results showed that police and their mock suspects often disagreed in their recollections of the interrogations; that the incident reports contained many errors of omission, with police understating their use of various tactics; and that naïve observers who later read the incident reports, compared to those who read the verbatim transcripts, saw the process as less pressured and the innocent mock suspects as more guilty (Kassin et al., 2017). 

Opponents continue to argue that recording will distract or inhibit suspects. In partnership with a northeastern police department, Kassin et al. (2019) tested that hypothesis by analyzing 122 real cases in which the suspects were randomly informed or not informed that their sessions would be recorded. The result? Informed suspects spoke as often, were as likely to waive their Miranda rights, and were as likely to make admissions, not just denials. Detectives also rated them as equally open and cooperative. One year later, the two sets of cases were similarly adjudicated. No informed suspect refused to speak on camera. In short, there was no evidence to support the claim that recording inhibits suspects. 

Finally, it is important to note that video recording the entire process has both a temporal component (from start to finish) and a visual-spatial component (from a “neutral” camera angle). This latter component is derived from basic social cognition research on visual salience in attribution (e.g., Taylor & Fiske, 1975), which inspired numerous studies showing that observers who see only the suspect tend to judge the situation as less coercive and the suspect as more guilty than those who can also see the interrogator. By directing visual attention toward the accused, the camera can thus lead jurors to underestimate the amount of pressure actually exerted by the ‘‘hidden’’ detective (Lassiter & Irvine, 1986; Lassiter et al., 1992; for an overview of this research, see Lassiter et al., 2001). Indeed, even the perceptions of experienced trial judges are influenced by variations in camera perspective (Lassiter et al., 2007). 

A second line of research aims to provide alternatives to the Reid technique. In the 1980s and 1990s, in response to several high-profile false confessions, police officers in England and Wales collaborated with research psychologists to propose alternative interview techniques that were non-coercive, ethical, and transparent. Stricter controls were introduced, including the rule that all sessions must be recorded. With cognitive interviewing as a guiding conceptual force (Fisher & Geiselman, 1992; Fisher et al., 1989), the word “interrogation” was removed from the vernacular as the primary objective was to gather information, not necessarily by confession. This multidisciplinary group created a five-stage interview model known by the mnemonic PEACE (Planning and preparation; Engage and explain; Account; Closure; Evaluation). Over the years, PEACE and its variants have evolved in response to new research (e.g., Milne & Bull, 1999; Shepherd & Griffiths, 2013).  

During this time, researchers have sought to compare different approaches. In general, controlled laboratory experiments that have compared the tendency for accusatorial and information-gathering methods of interrogation to elicit true and false confessions. These studies have indicated that whereas accusatorial interrogations increased both true and false confessions, the information-gathering approach maintained and sometimes increased the rate of true confessions while simultaneously reducing the rate of false confessions. (For a meta-analysis, see Meissner et al., 2014). Hence, a good deal of research is now aimed at devising and evaluating different approaches (e.g., Granhag et al., 2015; Meissner et al., 2017; Oleszkiewicz, & Watson, 2020).  

Forensic Sciences: Accuracy, Bias, and Error 

A distinction is often made between testimonial evidence (e.g., eyewitnesses, alibis, defendants, victims, and other lay witnesses) and hard physical evidence. Whereas lay witnesses are subject to cognitive and motivational flaws, the forensic sciences are presumed to be objective and relatively insulated from bias. But in recent years, the Innocence Project’s DNA exonerations have revealed that faulty forensic sciences contributed to more than half of their wrongful convictions. Two sets of problems have come to light: (1) Forensic science judgments were often derived from inadequate testing and analysis; and (2) experts often gave exaggerated testimony, drawing conclusions not fully supported by the data (Garrett, 2021).  

National Academy of Sciences (2009) Critique 

In 2009, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) published a scathing critique of a broad range of forensic disciplines. Included in this critique were judgments made of toolmarks and firearms; hair and fiber analysis; blood spatter; bite marks; tire and shoe impressions; fire and explosive analysis; serological analysis; handwriting; and even fingerprints, which until recently were considered infallible. NAS concluded that there are problems with standardization, reliability, accuracy and error, and hence the potential for contextual bias.  

The criticisms of these forensic sciences were twofold. First, all too often the stimulus does not compel a perceptual judgment that is objective, hence there is a concern both for inter-rater reliability across experts and for intra-test reliability over time.  In one study, for example, latent fingerprint experts reached different match judgments on the same prints approximately 10% of the time (Ulery et al., 2012). Stemming from the subjective nature of these judgments is a corollary concern that forensic experts’ judgments are “biasable” and hence influenced by psychological and contextual factors, including criminal stereotypes (Smalarz et al., 2016; for overviews, see Cooper & Meterko, 2019; Kassin, Dror, & Kukucka, 2013; for a description of these extrinsic sources of information, such as pressure from detectives and prosecutors, see Saks et al., 2003).  

Research on Forensic Confirmation Biases 

Problems with reliability, subjectivity, and bias are not merely abstract concerns. In fact, forensic science errors have surfaced with alarming frequency in DNA exoneration cases and other wrongful convictions (Garrett, 2011). This problem was foreseeable. In an 1894 treatise on distinguishing genuine from forged signatures, William Hagan wrote: “There must be no hypothesis at the commencement, and the examiner must depend wholly on what is seen, leaving out of consideration all suggestions or hints from interested parties” (p. 82). Indeed, Hagan was among the first scholars to acknowledge the biasing effects of context on perceptual-forensic judgments. Then in 1974, Tversky and Kahneman suggested that confirmation bias effects could extend to the legal system insofar as “beliefs concerning the likelihood of...the guilt of a defendant” could impact judicial decision-making (p. 1124). They suggested too that such biases could affect not only the layperson, but judges and other experienced professionals as well. 

Over the years, psychologists have identified several confirmation biases by which people seek, perceive, interpret, and create new evidence in ways that verify their preexisting beliefs. (For an overview of classic studies, see Nickerson, 1998). Recent studies have used complex stimuli to demonstrate the influence of expectation. For example, people see more facial resemblance in photographs of adult-child pairs when led to believe that the adult and child were genetically related (Bressan & Dal Martello, 2002); they see more similarity between a suspect and a facial composite when led to believe that the suspect is guilty (Charman et al., 2009); and they hear more incrimination in degraded speech recordings when the interviewee was thought to be a crime suspect than a witness (Lange et al., 2011). Although similar effects can be driven by wishful seeing (e.g., Balcetis & Dunning, 2006, 2010; Radel & Clement-Guillotin, 2012), these biases are a natural and automatic feature of human cognition that can occur in the absence of self-interest and operate without conscious awareness (Kunda, 1990; Nickerson, 1998).  

A growing body of evidence now shows that the forensic “sciences” are also subject to contextual bias and error (Dror, 2016; Dror & Cole, 2010; Dror & Murrie, 2018; Kassin et al., 2013). In an early study conducted in Israel, polygrapher examiners’ interpretations of inconclusive polygraph charts were shaped by their beliefs as to whether the examinee or someone else had confessed (Elaad et al., 1994). Since that time, studies have shown context effects on lay perceptions of handwriting similarity (Kukucka & Kassin, 2014), complex DNA mixtures (Dror & Hampikian, 2011), forensic anthropologists’ visual assessments of skeletal remains (Nakhaeizadeh et al., 2014), and other forensic judgments. In one study, for example, 58 experienced crime scene investigators viewed a mock crime scene to determine if the victim had died by suicide or was murdered. Their conclusions were significantly influenced by contextual information about the victim to which they had been exposed (van den Eeden et al., 2016). In a second study involving 133 forensic pathologists, determinations as to the manner a toddler’s death (homicide or accident) were influenced by non-medical information about the race of the child and whether the caretaker was a grandmother or the mother’s boyfriend (Dror et al., 2021).    

Even latent fingerprint judgments are subject to bias. In one study, Dror, Charlton, and Peron (2006) asked five experienced fingerprint experts to assess pairs of fingerprints that, unbeknownst to them, they had examined years earlier and declared to be a match. Before the stimuli were re-presented, these examiners were told that the fingerprints were taken from a case of erroneous identification. Guided by this biasing information, only one of the five experts judged the fingerprints to be a match. This study is particularly concerning because the effect of context was obtained among experienced examiners, in a highly trusted forensic science, and in a within-subject experimental design.  

In a followup study, Dror and Charlton (2006) presented six latent fingerprint experts with eight pairs of prints from a crime scene and suspect in an actual case in which they had previously made a match or exclusion judgment. The participants did not know they were taking part in a study, believing instead that they were conducting routine casework. The prints were accompanied either by no extraneous information, information that the suspect had confessed, suggesting a match; or information that the suspect was in custody at the time, suggesting exclusion. Results showed that contextual information in the custody condition produced an overall change in 17% of the originally correct match decisions. Based on a meta-analysis of these two studies, Dror and Rosenthal (2008) estimated that the reliability of fingerprint experts’ judgments over time likely falls in the range of 0.33–0.80, implying a considerable degree of subjectivity.  

Proposals for Reform 

In April 2022, 53 year-old Melissa Lucio was set to be executed in Texas when she was granted a stay of execution. Fifteen years earlier, two-year-old Mariah, the youngest of Lucio’s children, had fallen down a flight of stairs while the family was moving into a new apartment. She later died, after which Lucio was interrogated by five detectives for several hours through the night until she said, “I guess I did it” and made other vague admissions. Lucio had no history of violence, no one in the home witnessed anything, and there was no medical evidence to suggest that the child had been beaten. After she was induced to implicate herself, two of her interrogators accompanied the forensic pathologist as she conducted the autopsy. Lucio’s attorney at trial did not challenge this practice on cross examination or ask why. Yet the autopsy report later served to “corroborate” Lucio’s confession (Kassin, 2022). In 2022, APA submitted an amicus brief on Lucio’s behalf (https://www.apa.org/about/offices/ogc/amicus/lucio.pdf) and the Texas courts stayed her execution. As of April 2024, indications are that her conviction may be overturned.  

Over the years, several researchers have proposed reforms that would limit contextual bias effects. Modeled after double-blind procedures aimed to reduce experimenter bias in psychology and other sciences, and the double-blind lineup in eyewitness identification procedures, the simplest reform is to ensure that forensic examiners are blind to case file information that is not relevant to the perceptual pattern matching judgment they are tasked to make. Many forensic examiners do not agree that this is necessary (e.g., Butt, 2013). To assess practitioner opinions on this issue, Kukucka et al. (2017) surveyed 403 experienced forensic examiners from 21 countries. Most respondents regarded their judgments as nearly infallible and exhibited only a limited understanding of cognitive bias. Most believed they were immune by virtue of their training, and fewer than half supported blind testing. Exhibiting a classic “bias blind spot” (Pronin, Lin, & Ross, 2002), most attributed more bias to domains of specialization other than their own and to fellow examiners other than themselves. (For similar results among forensic mental health experts, see Zapf et al., 2018). To further complicate matters, research shows that forensic examiners may also exhibit an “allegiance effect”—a tendency to favor the party that hired them (Murrie et al., 2013; 2015). 

In addition to blind testing, a second recommendation for pattern-matching forensic disciplines (e.g., fingerprints, fibers, toolmarks) is to require examiners to identify matches from an array modeled after an eyewitness lineup in which the suspect’s print is accompanied by “innocent” fillers (Wells et al., 2013). Although more research is needed, initial indications are that this added protection reduces false alarms and yields better results overall as measured by d′ analyses on suspect samples (Kukucka et al., 2020; Quigley-McBride & Wells, 2018). 

Expert Testimony 

Psychologists contribute to the criminal justice system as experts at multiple levels.  They might assess criminal defendants for their competence to stand trial, criminal responsibility, or whether a juvenile should be tried as an adult. Experts sometimes consult with defense attorneys who are trying to decide how to challenge eyewitness evidence or argue that a confession is coerced and unreliable. In these scenarios, experts might testify at pre-trial hearings where defense attorneys attempt to have evidence suppressed. If a criminal case makes it to trial, expert witnesses might be called to help explain complicated concepts or counterintuitive findings to a jury. This could include testimony for the prosecution about forensic evidence such as bite marks, fingerprints, hair analyses, DNA, or tire treads. It could also include testimony in support of particular defenses such as Battered Woman Syndrome (e.g., Mechanic, 2022), or testimony about the impact of suggestive procedures underlying an eyewitness identification decision.  

Courts and legal professionals rely on psychological experts to help them prepare, prosecute, or defend cases. Unfortunately, expert witnesses (except forensic experts) have an uneven history in contributing productively to criminal justice. One such expert was Fred Zain who worked for the West Virginia State Crime lab for 10 years (and later worked in Texas). During his professional career, Zain testified in over 182 cases in West Virginia alone. According to the Innocence Project, his malfeasance in these trials was extensive.  According to the Innocence Project, he “overstated the strength of his results, overstated and misreported the frequency of genetic matches on multiple pieces of evidence, reported inconclusive tests as conclusive, failed to report conflicting results, [and] reported scientifically impossible or improbable [findings]” (www.innocenceproject.org).  Fred Zain was investigated for criminal wrongdoing but died before the cases against him reached a final resolution. One other example of pervasive and consequential errors in expert testimony concerns a forensic odontologist and a medical examiner (Balko & Carrington, 2018). These two examples do not represent isolated instances: Among the first 325 DNA exonerations, 47% had false forensic evidence as a contributing factor in the wrongful conviction (https://innocenceproject.org/causes-wrongful-conviction./).  

Whether an expert witness is allowed to testify is determined by a judge. Early guidance on whether to admit expert testimony came from Frye v. United States (1923). This decision indicated that experts could testify in court if the testimony (a) would assist the trier of fact, and (b) the material testified about was generally accepted. The Frye standard was inadequate for ensuring that expert testimony featured scientifically validated findings.  For example, the “general acceptance” criterion meant that handwriting analyses were admitted, even though they were not empirically validated.  This criterion also meant newer forms of evidence, such as blood analysis at the time, were excluded because they were not “generally accepted” even though they had been subjected to rigorous testing. 

Current federal guidance asserts that judges are gatekeepers of whether expert testimony passes the threshold of admissibility. To decide whether to admit expert testimony, judges are guided by the United States Supreme Court decision in Daubert v. Merrill Dow Pharmaceuticals (1993). To decide whether to admit expert testimony, judges review a series of four criteria: (1) has theory or technique been tested or is subject to being tested? (2) has theory or technique been subjected to peer review and publication? (3) what is the known about potential rate of error in applying the particular scientific theory or technique? (4) to what extent has the theory or technique received general acceptance in the relevant scientific community?  

Kumho Tire Co. v. Carmichael (1998) expanded the decision in Daubert such that individuals can testify as expert witnesses if they have any form of “specialized knowledge” that might assist triers of fact.  This case turned on whether a tire failure analyst qualified as an expert witness who could testify as to the source of a tire failure that resulted in the death of one individual.  Because the tire expert was not scientifically trained, his testimony was initially rejected. However, the Supreme Court ultimately decided that Daubert criteria could be applied to a proffered expert who intends to testify based on specialized skill or expertise.   

Relying on judges as gatekeepers assumes that they are capable of discerning when expert testimony should be admitted. Unfortunately, research suggests judges are not well qualified to do this.  In one study, an alarming 17% of judges indicated that they would admit expert testimony, regardless of the internal validity of the research on which the testimony was based (Kovera & McAuliff, 2000). That same study indicated that training can improve judges’ evaluations of some elements of scientific research, but not all. Unfortunately, training on scientific validity is not regularly part of judges’ training. This makes sense given that judges are required to assess the scientific validity of a vast array of research fields, and not just those related to psychology. Asking judges to serve as gatekeepers for all expert testimony is a tall order.  In response, some psychological scientists have suggested appointing impartial scientific experts to help translate research findings for judges (Young & Goodman-Delahunty, 2021). 

One way for judges to understand whether the content of an expert’s potential testimony is generally accepted is through surveys of relevant experts. Several such surveys have been conducted over the years to assess general acceptance related to both eyewitness evidence and confession evidence. For eyewitness evidence, two surveys have been conducted (Kassin et al., 1989; Kassin et al., 2001). These surveys indicated high agreement among experts about many topics related to eyewitness evidence. For example, 98% of eyewitness experts agreed that lineup instructions can influence identification decisions (Kassin et al., 2001). Importantly these surveys also asked experts whether they thought the research finding was common sense. This question is important because topics on which common sense (i.e., juror) understanding is low might be those for which expert testimony is most useful. In the 2001 survey. one of the biggest discrepancies was for findings related to confidence malleability: 95% of experts agreed that this effect existed and only 10% of experts thought this concept was common sense. Another survey has been conducted assessing consensus about research findings among confession experts (Kassin et al., 2018). This survey indicated that several research findings are supported by more than 85% of the 87 experts surveyed.  These include the findings that false confession likelihood increases with threats, suggestions of leniency, juvenile suspects, and suspects with intellectual disabilities. 

One challenge for expert witnesses who testify at trial is to help jurors become more discriminating consumers of a body of research without leading them to entirely dismiss the relevant evidence.  This concern can be seen in the context of eyewitness identification evidence. Here, experts should seek to help jurors to understand factors that interfere with eyewitness accuracy without causing them to dismiss eyewitnesses entirely (Loftus, 1980). In this context, research focuses on how to understand jurors’ evaluations of expert testimony (e.g., Martire et al., 2020) or on mechanisms to increase understanding of expert testimony (e.g. Jones & Kovera, 2015). 

Another potential problem with expert testimony in an adversarial context concerns the extent to which their views are biased by  their allegiance to the party that sought their opinion and hired them to testify. Do experts inadvertently align themselves with the party that called solicited their testimony?  In an experiment aimed at testing the “adversarial allegiance effect,” Murrie et al. (2013) tested 108 practicing forensic experts. These experts evaluated case files and provided opinions using risk assessment measures designed to be objective. The experts were told that they were consulting for either the defense or the prosecution. Those who thought they were consulting for the defense produced risk assessment values for the defendant that were lower (i.e., consistent with a defense allegiance) than when they thought they were consulting for the prosecution, especially for the more subjective of the two risk assessment measures. The authors ruled out the possibility that the experts’ pre-existing attitudes were more favorable to or side or the other, thereby supporting the contention that experts’ opinions can be tainted by side that hires them (see also McAuliff & Arter, 2016). 

LEGAL DECISION-MAKING 

The criminal justice apparatus is extensive and complex. Once evidence is gathered and analyzed from the crime scene, as well as from witnesses, suspects, and forensic examiners, a prosecutor must determine whether there is sufficient evidence to try the defendant. If so, there are two mechanisms for achieving an outcome: A trial in court before a judge and/or jury, or a negotiated plea agreement by which the defendant pleads guilty in exchange for reduced charges or sentencing. Social psychologists have examined both of these processes. 

Trial by Jury 

The jury system that evolved in England plays an important role in the criminal justice systems of more than fifty countries and territories of the world, with some countries introducing forms of jury trials as recently as 2009. In countries that aspire to be more democratic, as well as those with a longstanding tradition, it is now common to recruit ordinary citizens to decide cases (Vidmar, 2000; Ivković et al., 2021; with specific regard to American juries, see Vidmar & Hans, 2007). Over the years, social psychologists have examined three stages of a trial: (1) The selection of individual jurors, (2) the presentation of evidence and arguments in court, and (3) the process by which juries deliberate to reach a verdict (for an overview of recent research, see Kovera, 2017).  

Studying Juries: Comment on Research Methods  

In 1952, the Ford Foundation funded what would become known as the University of Chicago Jury Project, directed by Harry Kalven and a team of social scientists, including Hans Zeisel. The two would go on to produce The American Jury, the study described earlier in which they compared judges’ would-be verdicts to the actual verdicts rendered by their juries. This was a brilliant study, but not the method with which they began. Aiming to shed light on how juries make decisions, the Chicago group sought to spy on the deliberations of real juries. They gained permission from a federal judge to bug the jury room—in civil cases only and with approval from the trial judge and attorneys (the juries were not informed). The tapes were secured until the case was decided and the identities of all jurors were protected. With these precautions in place, they planted microphones behind the heating system of the jury room and recorded five deliberations. It was the first time in history this happened, and it would be the last. When the project was discovered, it stirred a public uproar. A federal law was passed making it illegal to observe or eavesdrop on a jury’s deliberations. Many states followed suit. As a result, later generations of jury researchers had to find less direct approaches. 

Jury research has taken different forms that vary in their ecological validity. In some studies, college students or jury-eligible adults are recruited to serve as mock jurors in a classroom, a real or laboratory courtroom, or, more recently, in a virtual format. In these instances, stimulus materials have consisted of brief, written case summaries, abbreviated trial transcripts, and videotaped mock trials. In some studies, participants are questioned afterward, yielding a distribution of individual verdict preferences; in other fewer instances, these individuals are then assembled to deliberate in small groups, yielding both pre-post changes in their opinions as well as group-level jury verdicts and conviction rates. (For perspectives on jury research methods, see Bornstein, 1999; Devine, 2012; Kerr, 2017; Koehler & Meixner, 2017; Krauss & Lieberman, 2017).  

Jury Selection 

Jury selection is a two-stage process. First, the court compiles a master list of eligible citizens from the community. Second, a small number of people from that list are randomly drawn and summoned for jury duty, at which point they are questioned under oath by the judge and lawyers in a process known as voir dire. During this process of deselection, prospective jurors who exhibit clear indications of bias (e.g., conflict of interest) are removed via a challenge for cause. Among those who remain, lawyers are permitted to challenge a limited number of prospective jurors who exhibit no discernable signs of bias. These are called peremptory challenges. An attorney may thus eliminate a limited number of prospective jurors without stating reasons for their excusal.  

Trial lawyers as intuitive psychologists

Acting as intuitive psychologists, lawyers typically use peremptory challenges to accept some jurors and reject others on the basis of implicit personality theories and stereotypes. This process has proved particularly interesting to social psychologists (Devine, 2012; Kovera & Cutler, 2013; Vidmar & Hans, 2007).  

Early research showed that although some experienced trial attorneys take pride in their jury-selection skills, most cannot effectively predict how jurors will vote, either on the basis of intuitive heuristics (Olczak et al., 1991) or by relying on how prospective jurors answer questions during the voir dire (Kerr et al., 1991). Hence, jurors in one study who were excluded via peremptory challenges rendered verdicts that were similar to those who were actually seated in those cases (Zeisel & Diamond, 1978). Other studies pointed to the fact that attorneys make the same predictions as college students—and that neither group’s selections are ultimately predictive of jurors’ verdicts (Johnson & Haney, 1994; Olczak et al., 1991). Part of the problem is that although individual jurors differ in their dispositional tendencies (e.g., see the Juror Bias Scale; Kassin & Wrightsman, 1983; Lecci & Myers, 2002), the question of whether a demographic, attitudinal, or personality characteristic predicts verdicts depends on the specifics of each case. 

The jury selection process can also have two troubling effects. The first is suggested by classic social psychological research on behavioral confirmation biases (e.g., Snyder & Swann, 1978; Snyder et al., 1977). If lawyers approach a prospective juror with a set of expectations, based on stereotypes, for example, they are likely to ask questions designed to confirm their beliefs and thereby increase the likelihood of doing so. In a mock trial study, practicing attorneys who were asked to prepare questions based on juror profiles asked questions consistent with those profiles and ultimately formed conclusions that were biased by the questions they asked (Otis et al., 2014). That said, a recent series of online mock juror studies has shown that although generic voir dire questions that require jurors to voluntarily disclose the fact that they cannot be impartial are unlikely to prove informative, more probing questions concerning specific trial-relevant attitudes can uncover biases relevant to making peremptory challenges (Salerno et al., 2021). 

A second problem with this aspect of jury selection is that it opens the door for lawyers to remove disproportionate numbers of members of specific racial, ethnic, or gender groups, thereby stripping the jury of its diversity. To prevent this, the U.S. Supreme Court limited the use of these challenges by requiring lawyers suspected of discriminating based on race to explain the basis of their challenges (Batson v. Kentucky, 1986; Miller-El v. Dretke, 2005). Unfortunately, research has shown (1) that the influence of conscious and unconscious racial stereotypes on social perceptions is prevalent and likely to influence lawyers in the courtroom; and (2) that these racial biases are difficult to identify in specific instances because lawyers, like people in general, typically do not acknowledge the influence of stereotypes (Sommers & Norton, 2008). In a study that illustrated both points, Sommers and Norton (2007) presented college students, law students, and attorneys with a summary of a criminal trial involving a Black defendant and had them choose between two prospective jurors with various characteristics—one white, the other Black. As predicted, all groups were far more likely to challenge the juror who was Black, yet very few participants cited race as a factor in their decisions. The pernicious effects of these exclusions extend beyond simply disenfranchising Black potential jurors to affecting their perceptions of the system’s fairness (Abramowitz & Douglass, 2023). 

Scientific jury selection

The dual realizations that intuitive jury selection is generally ineffective and that case-specific attitudes are stronger predictors than generalized measures of juror bias spawned a new service industry: scientific jury selection. Starting in the 1970s, social scientists have taken an empirical approach to helping attorneys select juries (Schulman et al., 1973). Since that time, on a case-by-case basis, trial consultants are hired to conduct community surveys, interviews, mock trials, and other types of research in an effort to discern predictive links between juror characteristics on the one hand, and case-specific verdict tendencies on the other. That information is then used to guide the use of peremptory challenges (for an overview, see Lieberman & Sales, 2007).  

This case-specific approach makes empirical sense. It is clear that attitudes are often predictive of verdicts in attitude-relevant cases. In the civil arena, for example, jurors who believe that society is too litigious are less likely to award the plaintiff punitive damages in a high-stakes lawsuit (Vinson et al., 2008). Similarly, jurors who are sympathetic to the insanity defense are more likely to vote a defendant not guilty by reason of insanity (Skeem et al., 2004). For these reasons, scientific jury selection—based on the notion that ideal juror profiles are case specific—makes sense. That said, it is important to note that while this empirical approach improves upon intuition, it has not been thoroughly evaluated; its effectiveness has been described as “still murky” (Lieberman, 2011).  

Death qualification

Over the years, the death penalty has stimulated a heated public debate in the United States. Support for capital punishment has waned in recent years. According to the Pew Research Center (2021), however, 60% of U.S. adults continue to favor the death penalty for people convicted of murder—despite having doubts about its administration, deterrent effects, and fairness (e.g., 78% concede that there is a risk that innocent people will be executed). Today, a slim majority of U.S. states permit capital punishment. In most that do, the jury decides not only the verdict but the sentence. Using juries to determine sentences may be the more “cautious” way to proceed: An analysis of capital cases in Delaware showed that juries are more reluctant than judges to vote for the death penalty (Hans et al., 2015). 

In states that empower juries to make sentencing decisions, their determinations are influenced not just by the specifics of the case, but also by jurors’ general attitudes and orientations—such as fundamentalist religious views (Miller & Hayward, 2008) and the belief that the world is just (Butler & Moran, 2007). In capital cases in which the jury makes render both verdicts and sentencing decisions, a special jury-selection practice known as “death qualification” is typically used by which judges may exclude prospective jurors who say that they would refuse to vote for a death sentence. Early studies involving mock and real jurors showed that this selection practice (by which death penalty opponents are excluded) disproportionately removes African Americans and other demographic groups and tips the balance toward the prosecution when it comes to the verdict (Cowan et al., 1984; Moran & Comfort, 1986). In fact, a death qualification voir dire in which prospective jurors are asked guilt-presumptive questions about sentencing may even instill bias in those who survive this screening process (Cowan et al., 1984). Just watching a death qualification procedure can make jurors more prone to convict (Haney, 1984).  

Although the courts continue to permit death qualification voir dire, new research addresses the issue. In one study, Haney et al. (2022) conducted in-depth telephone surveys of jury-eligible adults in three states and found that individuals whose attitudes qualified them to serve on a capital jury were less racially diverse, more punitive, less informed about death sentencing, more willing to consider aggravating factors to impose a death sentence, and less willing to consider mitigating factors to impose life in prison instead.  In a second study, Vitriol and Kovera (2018) replicated the finding that that jurors who are exposed to a death qualification voir dire become more prone to convict. They found that watching this type of voir dire increased pretrial estimates of the defendant’s guilt and likelihood of conviction. Surprisingly, however, they found that participants exposed to the death qualification voir dire were significantly less likely to convict after hearing the trial evidence. A follow-up study showed that this guilt-presumptive voir dire led participants to  expect more evidence of guilt than was actually presented.  

The Courtroom Trial 

Once a jury is selected, the evidence previously gathered is presented. Within the constraints imposed by the rules of evidence, the jury may be exposed to testimony from eyewitnesses, alibi witnesses, the defendant, police officers, victims, informants, and forensic examiners and other experts. These individuals may be accompanied by photographs, documents, surveillance footage, cell phone records, and other tangible forms of proof. The trial is a well-orchestrated event. Lawyers make opening statements and closing arguments, witnesses undergo direct and cross examination under oath, and the judge instructs the jury. As a rule, juries are sound decision makers whose verdicts are based largely on the strength of the evidence presented at trial (Devine, 2012; Diamond & Rose, 2005). Still, as we saw earlier, juries tend to accept eyewitness identifications, confessions, informants, and forensic science tests often without sufficient scrutiny of the situations in which these types of evidence were taken. 

Extraneous influences

A trial follows strict rules of evidence and procedure. The goal is to ensure that juries base their verdicts solely on the evidence and testimony presented in court and not on pretrial news stories, social media rumors, or information that was disclosed at trial but ruled inadmissible. Yet, mock jury experiments have shown that juries can be biased by exposure to prejudicial pretrial publicity that might be reported in a newspaper (e.g., Kramer et al., 1990; Daftary-Kapur et al., 2014).  

Pretrial publicity is potentially dangerous because it often divulges information that is not later allowed into the trial record and because it often precedes the actual presentation of evidence. Public opinion surveys consistently show that the more people know about a case, the more likely they are to presume the defendant guilty, even when they claim to be impartial (e.g., Kovera, 2002). This is not a particularly surprising result. The information in news reports usually comes from the police and district attorney’s office, so it often presents information unfavorable to the defense (Bakhshay & Haney, 2018). Analyses of secretly recorded mock jury deliberations also show that exposure to pretrial publicity was openly discussed, and tainted the jury’s discussions of the defendant and evidence—despite the judge’s warning to disregard that information (Ruva & LeVasseur, 2012; Ruva & Guenther, 2015). Meta-analyses spanning 20 years converge on the conclusion that exposure to pretrial publicity that favors or disfavors the defendant can have a significant biasing effect on individual jurors and post-deliberation verdicts (Steblay et al., 1999; Hoetger et al., 2022). 

Just as jurors can be biased by outside news stories, they occasionally receive extralegal information within the body of the trial itself. If a witness discloses hearsay that is not considered reliable or blurts out something about the defendant’s past that is excluded for being prejudicial (in either case, information the jury is not supposed to hear), the opposing lawyer will object and the judge will sustain the objection and instruct the jury to disregard that disclosure. Over the years, numerous experiments have shown that mock jurors are biased by the inadmissible testimony even when instructed to disregard it.  In fact, the instruction to disregard sometimes backfires. There are several possible explanations, for example, (1) the objection-ruling-instruction draws attention to the forbidden information, causing the ironic effect that it intrudes on consciousness with increasing frequency; (2) the instruction is perceived as restrictive of  jurors’ decision-making freedom, thereby arousing psychological reactance; and (3) jurors want to reach the right decision, so whether they comply and disregard information depends on whether they see the inadmissible detail as relevant to achieving an accurate and just verdict (Lieberman & Arndt, 2000). For all these reasons, research has shown that jurors are often not deterred by “limiting instructions” (Steblay et al., 2006). 

The Process of Deliberation 

It is often said that the unique power of the jury stems from the wisdom that emerges when individuals come together, in private, as one group. By interviewing jurors after real trials and by recruiting people to participate on mock juries and recording their deliberations, researchers have learned a great deal about the interpersonal dimensions of jury decision-making.  

In theory, all jurors are created equal. In practice, however, dominance hierarchies often develop. As in other decision-making groups, a handful of individuals lead the discussion, while others join in at a lower rate or watch from the sidelines, speaking only to cast their votes (Hastie et al., 1983). Like other problem-solving groups, juries begin in a relaxed orientation period during which they set an agenda, raise questions, and explore the facts. Then, once differences of opinion are revealed (usually after the first vote is taken), factions develop, and the group shifts abruptly into a period of open conflict during which discussion becomes more focused and argumentative. Together, jurors scrutinize the evidence, construct stories to account for it, and discuss the judge’s instructions (Pennington & Hastie, 1992). If all jurors agree, they return a unanimous verdict. If not, the majority tries to achieve a consensus by converting those in the minority through informational and normative pressures. If unanimity is achieved, the group enters a period of reconciliation during which it smooths over the conflicts and affirms its satisfaction with the outcome. If the holdouts continue to disagree, the jury becomes deadlocked.  

With both informational and normative influences at work, the jury’s final verdict is largely predictable by the pre-deliberation opinions of the individual jurors. By interviewing the members of 225 juries, Kalven and Zeisel (1966) sought to reconstruct how these juries split on their very first vote. Out of 215 juries that opened with an initial majority, 209 reached a final verdict consistent with that first vote. This finding, which was later bolstered by the results of mock jury studies (e.g., see Kerr’s 1981 Social Transition Scheme; also see Stasser & Davis’s 1981 Social Interaction Sequence Model) led Kalven and Zeisel to conclude that “the deliberation process might well be likened to what the developer does for an exposed film; it brings out the picture, but the outcome is predetermined” (p. 489). It is now clear that the robust principle of “majority rules” describes jury outcomes as it does other small decision-making groups (Hastie & Kameda, 2005). There is, however, one wrinkle to this rule in the jury room: a shift to leniency. In criminal trials, deliberation tends to produce a shift toward leniency that favors the defendant. All other factors being equal, individual jurors are more likely to vote guilty on their own than in a group, and are more prone to convict before deliberations than they are afterward. Hence, juries that are equally divided in their initial vote are ultimately likely to return not-guilty verdicts (MacCoun & Kerr, 1988; Kerr & MacCoun, 2012). 

In past years, American courts have altered not only the composition of the jury (i.e., by seeking to prevent attorneys from excluding members based on race and other demographics), but also its size and decision-making rules. Traditionally, juries were 12-person entities that were required to reach a unanimous verdict to prevent a hung jury. But in a series of decisions, the U.S. Supreme Court determined that a six-person jury is of sufficient size to determine guilt beyond a reasonable doubt in noncapital cases (Williams v. Florida, 1970; in Ballew v. Georgia, the Court subsequently ruled that a five-person jury is too small). But are six-and twelve-person juries equivalent in process and verdicts? The Court approached this question as a social psychologist would but then misinterpreted the available research so badly that Michael Saks (1974) concluded it “would not win a passing grade in a high school psychology class” (p. 18). On the question of whether a reduced size undermines the ability of those in the voting minority to resist normative pressures, for example, the Court cited Asch’s (1956) conformity studies to argue that an individual juror’s resistance depends on the proportional size of the majority, that the lone dissenter in a 5-to-1 split is as well insulated as the minority in a 10-to-2 split, both at 83% to 17%. Of course, Asch, and others who followed, showed exactly the opposite—that the presence of a single ally enables dissenters to maintain their independence.  

A reduction in jury size has other effects too. Saks and Marti (1997) conducted a meta-analysis of studies involving 15,000 mock jurors who deliberated in over 2,000 six-person or 12-person juries. Overall, they found that the smaller juries were less likely to represent minority segments of the population. They also had less accurate recall of the evidence, generated fewer arguments about that evidence, and were more likely to reach a unanimous verdict—and to do so while deliberating for shorter periods of time. Even in civil trials, in which juries must make complex decisions on how much money to award the plaintiff, six-person groups spend less time discussing the case (Davis et al., 1997). 

At about the same time the U.S. Supreme Court was considering the issue of jury size, it also ruled to uphold convictions from less-than-unanimous 12-person juries whose voting margins were as small as 9 to 3. (The Court did not later permit non-unanimous verdicts in six-person juries; in addition, all states require unanimity in capital trials).  Until quite recently, all states but Oregon and Louisiana required unanimity in criminal felony trials. Louisiana’s use of non-unanimous juries ended in 2019 after voters supported an amendment to the state’s constitution. Oregon’s practice was also recently rejected in a U.S. Supreme Court decision that requires jury unanimity for serious criminal offenses. Part of the concern was that allowing non-unanimous juries derived from a blatant effort to disenfranchise Black jurors. Indeed, the majority noted that Louisiana “sculpted a ‘facially race-neutral’ rule permitting 10-to-2 verdicts in order ‘to ensure that African-American juror service would be meaningless’” (Ramos v. Louisiana, 2020).  

At the outset, research showed a non-unanimous decision rule adversely affected the  decision-making processes. In one study, over 800 participants took part in 69 mock juries. After watching a reenactment of a murder trial, the groups were instructed to reach a verdict by a 12-to-0, a 10-to-2, or an 8-to-4 margin. Compared with juries that needed unanimous decisions, the others voted earlier and spent less time discussing the case. After reaching the required number of votes, they often rejected the holdouts, terminated discussion, and returned a verdict. Afterward, participants in the non-unanimous juries rated their peers as more closed-minded and themselves as less informed and less confident about the verdict (Hastie et al., 1983). Recordings of deliberations revealed that majority-rule juries often adopted “a more forceful, bullying, persuasive style” (p. 112). 

Over the years, several innovations to traditional practice have been proposed to increase the jury’s competence—such as providing judge’s instructions before the evidence is presented, allowing jurors to pose questions to witnesses or take notes during trial, and providing the jury with copies of the judge’s instructions for their deliberations (Munsterman et al., 2006). One recent and interesting innovation concerns pre-deliberation discussions among jurors. Traditionally, individual jurors are prohibited from discussing the case until the courtroom presentations are complete and the jurors are assembled for deliberation. Among the reasons for this prohibition is the fear that such discussions could lead jurors to formulate strong opinions prematurely, before they have heard all the evidence and instructions. In a study involving a civil trial, Kerr and Jung (2018) manipulated whether mock jurors could engage in midtrial pre-deliberation discussion (after the plaintiff’s case but before the defendant’s). Results showed that discussion led participants to exhibit a significant recency effect: Regardless of the relative strength of the plaintiff and defense cases, those who discussed the case midway later placed a greater weight on the evidence that followed their discussion—evidence that had not “already been covered.” 

Plea Bargaining in the “Shadow of Trial” 

In recent years, research has shifted from the study of juries (which involves the social psychologies of individual social perception and group decision-making) to the study of plea decisions, which affect the vast majority of defendants who must decide whether to accept a negotiated  agreement and plead guilty in court in lieu of taking their chances at trial. 

Although the U.S. Constitution guarantees defendants the right to be tried by a jury of their peers, and although it is the trial that serves as the theatrical centerpiece of the legal system, today, the vast majority of cases in the U.S. and around the world are resolved via plea bargains. At present, well over 95% of convicted defendants in U.S. state, federal, and juvenile courts resolve their cases by pleading guilty, a number that has climbed steadily in recent years: At present, only 2% of federal criminal defendants go to trial (see Gramlich, 2019). This process represents an alternative to trial that results in enormous savings of time, money, and other resources for the criminal justice system.  

Classic Research 

Using laboratory experiments, role-playing studies, and interviews with individuals who had pled guilty, plea-bargaining research has focused on personal and situational factors that influence the defendant in the decision-making process. Early on, Gregory, Mowens, and Linder (1978) reported the results of a role-playing study showing that participants who imagined themselves guilty were far more likely to accept a guilty plea than those who were innocent (81% vs. 18%). Among those who were guilty, they were more likely to accept a plea when relatively more charges were filed against them and/or when the severity of punishment upon conviction was severe. The researchers then proceeded to replicate the effect of guilt on willingness to accept a plea bargain in a high stakes experiment in which participants were or were not induced to cheat. This pioneering effort was followed by a smattering of additional role-playing decision-making studies in which actual guilt or innocence, number of charges, probability of conviction, and sentencing severity were manipulated (Bordens, 1984; Bordens & Bassett, 1985; McAllister & Bregman, 1986).  

Wave of New Studies 

With researchers focused on juries, the study of plea bargaining lay dormant for over 20 years. During that time, the number of cases resolved by guilty pleas in lieu of trial climbed steadily from 80% to its current level of more than 95%, leading the U.S. Supreme Court to acknowledge that “criminal justice today is for the most part a system of pleas, not a system of trials” (Lafler v. Cooper, 2012, p. 1388). Reflecting the concern that a diminishing number of citizens accused of crimes get their day in court, and the emerging possibility that some number of innocent defendants are compelled to plead guilty, researchers have exhibited a renewed and highly active focus on this topic. 

It is clear that people are far more likely to plead guilty if they committed the crime for which they are charged than if they did not; but with so many cases being resolved outside of court as part of an often hasty agreement between a prosecutor and defendant, and with plea offers that incentivize defendants to obtain significant “plea discounts” relative to the “trial penalty” that would follow from conviction, several judges, legal scholars, and researchers have become concerned about the “innocence problem”—that some number of innocent defendants, feeling pressured by a fear of conviction at trial followed by a severe sentence—plead guilty “in the shadow of trial” (Bibas, 2004; Bushway et al., 2014; Rakoff, 2021; Tor et al., 2010). 

As of December, 2022, 25% of the more than 3,500 wrongful convictions archived by the National Registry of Exonerations involved individuals who had pled guilty in lieu of trial (https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/about.aspx). (It is important to note that these figures underestimate the actual occurrence of such cases, many of which are never scrutinized, in part because plea agreements limit the defendant’s right of appeal; see Redlich & Bonventre, 2015.) This concern has inspired a new generation of social-psychological theorizing and research (for overviews, see Edkins & Redlich, 2019; Redlich et al., 2017). As Redlich, Bibas, Edkins, and Madon (2017) noted, “Guilty pleas eschew much of the open, adversarial process in favor of waivers of trial safeguards and hasty, secretive bargains, and arguably create incentives for innocent people to accept responsibility for crimes they did not commit” (p. 339). 

In both laboratory experiments and standardized interviews with individuals who had pled guilty, current research focuses on the question of how often and why defendants decide to accept or reject plea offers (Dervan & Edkins, 2012; Zottoli et al., 2016). In experiments that involved role-playing in hypothetical scenarios or in which participants make decisions that they believe will have a consequence, many innocent people accept a false guilty plea—at rates as high as 56% (Dervan & Edkins, 2013). False guilty pleas also occur in real cases. In one self-report study, 27% of juveniles and 19% of adults who were interviewed claimed that they were completely innocent of the crimes to which they pled guilty, not wanting to risk conviction on more serious charges (Zottoli et al., 2016). Not all defendants are equally susceptible: The rate of self-reported false guilty pleas is particularly high among juveniles (Cleary, 2017; Helm et al., 2018; Malloy et al., 2014; Zottoli et al., 2016) and adults with mental health problems (Redlich et al., 2010) and/or cognitive deficits, which may impair their comprehension of plea forms (Redlich & Bonventre, 2015).  

Situational factors may also increase the risk of an innocent person pleading guilty. In an article titled “Charged Up and Anchored Down,” Cardenas (2023) found that a prosecutor’s  threat of a high potential sentence serves as an anchor point that leads innocent mock defendants to accept a less consequential plea offer.  Illustrating Cialdini’s (2009) scarcity principle, prosecutors may also propose an “exploding offer” that the defendant must accept before the terms become null and void (Aprile, 2008). Research also indicates that defendants who are detained while awaiting trial are more likely to capitulate and accept a plea offer. Examining actual cases in Canada, Kellough and Wortley (2002) found that 55% of individuals who were not held in pretrial detention accepted plea offers, but that rate increased to between 70% and 85% among those who were held in pretrial detention. (For experimental support for this effect, see Edkins & Dervan, 2018). Analyses of official court data from multiple jurisdictions have also shown that detained defendants are faster to plead guilty than those who were not detained (Petersen, 2020). In a timely and conceptually related study, Wilford et al. (2021) devised a computer simulation role-playing paradigm in which they found that informing participant-defendants about the risks associated with serving jail time during COVID-19 increased both true and false guilty plea rates—and that innocent participants were particularly susceptible.  

As many defendants are heavily influenced by the advice of counsel, several researchers are now collecting data from practicing attorneys to assess their recommendations. Consistent with the rational “shadow of trial” model—which predicts that defendants and attorneys will accept plea offers when the expected value of the plea equals, or is less than, the expected value of the trial—this research has shown that defense attorney recommendations are strongly influenced by the strength of the evidence in an individual case (Edkins, 2011; Helm et al., 2018; Henderson, 2020; Henderson & Levett, 2018; Kramer et al., 2007; Pezdek & O’Brien, 2014; Redlich et al., 2018).  

Interestingly, this effect of evidence strength on attorneys is moderated not by its effect on their perceptions of the defendant’s actual guilt but by its effect on their beliefs about the probability of conviction at trial. To tease apart these alternative sources of influence, Hellgren and Kassin (2022) conducted two online experiments in which practicing attorneys received a case file containing highly inculpatory or exculpatory evidence that was either ruled admissible or not admissible in evidence. In both studies, the recommendation to accept a plea offer was driven by the perceived probability of conviction (i.e., only when the inculpatory and exculpatory evidence would be admissible at trial).  

It is important to note that in some ways the Shadow model does not appear to fully account for psychological factors that affect the plea decision. In one simulation study, for example, practicing defense attorneys recommended harsher plea agreements for Black defendants than for white defendants—even when the crime and evidence were the same (Edkins, 2011). Perhaps that result indicates implicit racial bias on the part of attorneys, or perhaps, consistent with the shadow model, it was based on the rational belief that Black defendants are more likely to be convicted at trial.  

To sum up, plea bargaining in countries all over the world offers a cost-efficient way to resolve criminal cases without trial. This alternative does not come without risk, however. At present, social psychologists are examining the process and whether it produces outcomes that are accurate, fair, and just, and whether it produces decisions that are knowing, intelligent, and voluntary, not overly manipulated, and are based on evidence and consequences that were fully disclosed. This topic that is booming with interest, and several previously untested questions are now receiving attention, such as the extent of judicial involvement in the process (Henderson et al., 2022) and how voluntariness and coercion within the context of plea agreements should be defined (Luna, 2022).  

SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY AND LAW: WHAT NEXT? 

In sharp contrast to the negative reaction evoked by Hugo Munsterberg’s (1908) On the Witness Stand, and beginning with the U.S. Supreme Court’s opinion in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) which cited social science research (including Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s famous doll studies) for the first time——social psychology has played an increasingly pivotal role throughout the legal system with regard to issues related to policing, the collection of evidence, jury trials, plea bargains, sentencing, incarceration, and the death penalty. 

In this chapter, we have reviewed some of the most prominent research in two broad areas: The first concerns the social psychology of evidence. When the Innocence Project was founded in 1992, DNA exonerations revealed surprising numbers of mistaken eyewitness identifications, false confessions, forensic science errors, and other human-generated flaws, often exacerbated by social influences, in the kinds of evidence that contributed to wrongful convictions. As one might expect, this realization inspired—and continues to inspire—the vast amounts of empirical research we reviewed. The second general topic is legal decision-making. Over the years, much of this research has focused on jury trials, a defendant’s constitutional right and the theatrical center of the criminal justice system by which lay-people render high-stakes judgments of their peers. In light of the increasing number of cases, now up to 97%, currently resolved through plea bargaining, a spate of new of research now examines this process and the risk of false guilty pleas from the standpoint of attorneys and defendants. 

The aforementioned topics point to the direct relevance of social psychological research in the legal arena. This work is frequently cited by the American Psychological Association in its amicus curiae briefs, by the courts ruling on matters of evidence and procedure, by social science experts who testify at hearings or trials, and by state legislatures proposing reforms to policies and practices. The influence of social psychology on the legal system will likely continue to grow. Consider the following newish concern: Many law enforcement officers have started to use body-worn cameras (BWC) to improve police-civilian interactions and make these interactions more transparent. The first generation of modern body cameras was introduced in the United Kingdom in 2005. Fueled by numerous incidents in which police officers were alleged to have used excessive force, the UK experiment was followed by large-scale implementation in the United States (see Hyland, 2018). Other countries have also followed suit. In fact, visual evidence is now often obtained not only via body cameras but via surveillance footage, “dash‐cam” footage, and bystanders with cell phones. The question is, what are the effects? 

Some research has aimed to document the effects of BWC on police-civilian encounters. In one study, Ready and Young (2015) found that officers who were assigned to wear a camera were less likely to perform stop-and-frisks and make arrests than those not assigned, but they were more likely to issue warnings and citations. In a second analysis, Goff et al. (2020) found that BWC officers initiated 38% fewer use-of-force incidents than did non-BWC officers, and also made 46% fewer pedestrian stops and 39% fewer arrests. A recent meta-analysis of 30 studies yielded more guarded results, however, suggesting that more research is needed to determine whether body-worn cameras significantly deter problematic civilian encounters (National Institute of Justice, 2022). 

Another line of research has aimed to evaluate people’s perceptions of BWC footage. In one series of studies, Jones et al. (2019) found that police actions toward a civilian were perceived to be more justified when viewed through body camera vs. surveillance footage. They also found that officers were viewed more favorably when participants watched body camera footage vs. bystander footage of the same encounters. Consistent with classic research on visual salience and attribution (e.g., Taylor & Fiske, 1975, see also Granot et al., 2018), body‐camera videos of incidents in which officers apprehend a civilian elicit perceptions favorable to police at least in part because the civilian is focal, making the officer’s movements less salient (see also Korva et al., 2022; Lassiter et al., 2001; Turner et al., 2019). 

Following a use-of-force incident, officers are required to complete a report describing what transpired. A third line of research has addressed the question of whether the officers should have access to the BWC recording before filing that report, which ostensibly reflects their own memory of the event. On the one hand, police departments seek to protect officers by providing the opportunity to file reports that are as “accurate” as possible by viewing the footage. On the other hand, does this access increase the accuracy of an officer’s memory or contaminate it with information they did not actually observe? Pezdek et al. (2022) had experienced police officers participate in two shooting-training scenarios after which they answered questions about what happened. Afterward, some participants (but not others) viewed footage of the scenarios. Then all participants re-answered the same questions. Results showed that exposure to the footage altered participants’ memories of the event itself, as well as their state of mind. In a test of their memory of the event they became more accurate, but the improvement was due to the recording, which they absorbed into their reported memory. Similar results have been obtained in a study of Dutch officers (Vredeveldt et al., 2021; for a more nuanced two-step perspective on officers’ access to BWC footage, see Jones & Strange, 2022). 

Making bold predictions about the future is a fool’s errand. But we can make some recommendations. To begin with, the interface of social psychology and law, like the interface of social psychology and other applied topics, must take into account the kinds of systemic racism that have long plagued the criminal justice system and the downstream effects it has produced on racial and ethnic populations (for a recent and compelling call to action, see Najdowski & Stevenson, 2022). In light of the transformative work that social psychologists have conducted on stereotyping, prejudice, and racism, both implicit (e.g., Devine, 1989) and overt (e.g., Dovidio & Gaertner, 2004), stereotype threat and other adverse consequences (e.g., Steele, 1997), and interventions aimed at reducing the prejudice “habit” (e.g., Devine et al., 2012), more work is urgently needed that integrates this basic research with applications to criminal justice and law (for role models, see Eberhardt, 2019; Banaji & Greenwald, 2013; Swencionis & Goff, 2017). Toward this end, the field should cultivate talented students and scholars from diverse disciplines and backgrounds. Indeed, as indicated by research in the narrow but relevant context of jury decision-making, deliberations among individuals of different racial backgrounds are measurably superior to those involving homogeneous single-race juries (Sommers, 2006).   

Future work in this area should also take cultural factors into account. For example, research shows that cultural orientations (e.g., individualism and collectivism) can influence the extent to which eyewitnesses report on focal vs. background details surrounding an observed event (Anakwah et al., 2020). Similarly, within and across cultures, individuals who exhibit an interdependent self-construal are more vulnerable to false confessions than those with a more independent self-construal, which could help to explain the wide variations in confession rates across cultures (Oeberst & Wu, 2015). Turning from the influences of culture on evidence to perceptions of justice, it is important to understand people’s perceptions of punishment—for example, how cultural beliefs in karma and karmic justice can curb the need for revenge (Goyal & Miller, 2023). 

Comparative research of this nature is also needed to examine similarities and differences in legal decision-making at trial and in plea bargaining. In contrast to the U.S. in which defendants have a right to a trial by jury, the factfinder in most other countries is a professional judge—or, as recently adopted in Japan, a system in which ordinary citizens sit with professional judges to adjudicate guilt and sentencing (Johnson, 2009; Weber, 2009). Do these decision-making bodies differ on process and outcome measures? Moreover, as the number of criminal cases resolved by plea bargains hit an all-time high in the U.S., so too the number of countries that have adopted a system of pleas versus trials has increased by 300% since 1990 (Fair Trials, 2017; Langer, 2021). How are these systems similar or different? As political systems around the world change, research is needed to assess the extent of the innocence problem across cultures. Whatever the future of criminal justice systems, the objectives of fairness and justice will be enhanced by solutions inspired and validated by social psychological research.  

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ENDNOTES

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