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The Hindsight Bias and Attitudes toward Police Deception in Eliciting Confessions

2009; Volume: 11; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

1527-7143

David T. Wasieleski, Mark A. Whatley, Shannon Murphy,

Psychopathy, Forensic Psychiatry, Sexual Offending

At the 2006 annual convention of the American Psychology-Law Society (APA Division 41), Dr. Saul Kassin chaired a session on police interrogations and false confessions. In his own segment of that session (Kassin, 2006, March), he described a series of controversial court cases in which individuals were convicted on the basis of highly suspect, and likely false, confessions. The description of the police use of deception in the case of Marty Tankleff caused the greatest audience disbelief and served as an impetus for the current study. Marty Tankleff confessed to assaulting and murdering his parents in 1988. Police detectives interrogated him for several hours, after which they employed deception to elicit this confession. Specifically, they told him that his father briefly awakened in the hospital and named him as the killer (Leo & Ofshe, 1998; The Marty Tankleff Story in Brief). He recanted the confession at the arrival of his lawyer, but was convicted and sentenced to 50 years to life in prison. The Tankleff case demonstrates one instance of a controversial conviction based on a confession elicited through the police's use of deception. Although such deception is illegal in several European countries, it is legal in the United States (Loftus, 2004) as long as it does not induce defendants to waive their Miranda rights to counsel or to remain silent. While physical abuse or torture is considered inappropriate and illegal in police interrogations, deception in the name of eliciting a confession has not been censured, either by police officers themselves or by the public at large. Compounding the difficulty is that the police interrogation is a guilt-presumptive (Kassin & Gudjonsson, 2004, p. 41), and investigators and lay people alike are poor at judging truth and deception (Kassin, 2005). While there is a growing trend in the U.S. toward taping interrogations to protect the legal rights of suspects (Kassin, 2005), current police use of deception during such interrogations is considered acceptable, if not standard, practice (Kassin & Gudjonsson, 2004). The reaction of those professionals in attendance at the aforementioned APLS Conference suggested significant outrage at the deception employed by the police, but the general public's reaction may be more muted, particularly if they believe Tankleff to be guilty. Additional factors also may predict differences in the opinions of participants regarding these issues and this case. For example, legal authoritarian attitudes have been found to be consistent with conviction proneness (Narby, Cutler, & Moran, 1993), and death penalty decisions (Hurst & Foley, 2005). In addition, attitudes favoring either a crime control or due process emphasis in law enforcement have been correlated with several criterion variables. Specifically, crime control attitudes have been significantly correlated with participants' predictions of recidivism (Schumacher, 1991) and verdict decisions (Wasieleski, 1995). Lastly, due process attitudes have been negatively correlated with participants' predictions of recidivism (Schumacher, 1991) and verdict and sentencing decisions (Wasieleski, 1995). We conducted the current study for two purposes: first, to assess reactions of college students to deception used by officers during the Tankleff interrogation; and second, to investigate whether the hindsight bias (Fischhoff, 1975) would impact the participants' ratings of the police's use of deception. The hindsight bias involves a tendency for individuals to rate the appropriateness of actions based on their outcomes. For example, an illegal search of a car by police would be considered appropriate if the police found drugs or contraband, but inappropriate if they found nothing illegal. Participants read a short vignette briefly describing elements of the Tankleff case where the outcome of the trial was manipulated (not guilty or guilty). Participants then completed measures of legal attitudes, crime control attitudes, legal authoritarianism, and their views on confessions. …