What is false confessions?

Hugo Münsterberg, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

Hugo Münsterberg answers

The false confession is, at its core, a product of the mind's collapse under conditions that science can describe with precision. The law has long guarded against the liar; it has scarcely begun to guard against the honest man who, under sufficient pressure, comes to believe — or at least to utter — what is false. Consider the mechanism. Exhaustion from sleepless nights and hunger, the fear of punishment, the emotion of uncertainty — these reduce the resistance of the will and create a state of heightened suggestibility.1

Add to that the monotonous repetition of accusation, encouraging confidential talk, the unvarying pressure of uniform sense impressions, and the resistance crumbles entirely, so that what discharges itself as confession may bear no relation to what the man actually did.2 The process is, psychologically, barely distinguishable from hypnotic influence — and I have seen with my own eyes what hypnotic suggestion can accomplish in a normal, intelligent person of wealth and social position, led by post-hypnotic command to declare intentions she would never have formed on her own.3

The case I examined in On the Witness Stand makes this vivid in the most terrible way. A young man, arrested and subjected to repeated police interrogation, reported afterward that from the moment he saw the flash of steel everything became a blur, a blank.4 He could not account for the statements attributed to him; he had no knowledge of having made them.5

What he did report spontaneously — the flash, the sudden onset of the blur — carried every clinical and psychological mark of truth, details so exact that a stupid boy could not have fabricated them.6 What he fabricated when left to his own faculties, by contrast, was a contradictory mixture of improbable and psychologically impossible occurrences — that is what his so-called confessions were.7

Six days after this was established, the punishment of death was executed.8 The lesson is not a comfortable one for the courts. Many modern methods of securing confessions — long detention before trial, fatiguing examinations, constantly repeated suggestive questions, threats, and willfully applied emotional shocks — are, from a psychological standpoint, unfit for the purpose they claim to serve, for precisely the same reasons that torture was unfit: the pain or the pressure overwhelms the will toward truth, and innocent persons confess.9 Justice that ignores this is building on sand.

Sources

  1. The exhaustion from sleepless nights and hunger, the fear of punishment, and the emotion of uncertainty greatly reduce the resistance of the will, and thus create a state of increased suggestibility.
    Psychology General and Applied
  2. If monotonous words, encouraging confidential talks and uniform sense impressions are added, the resistance crumbles, and the controlling idea of the truth discharges itself in confessions.
    Psychology General and Applied
  3. She said that she had passed the house by chance and that she thought it would be nice to show her doctor how much better she felt... her real purpose in coming was to report to me that she had selected me as her heir and that now she wanted accordingly to make her last will.
    On the Witness Stand
  4. 'From the time that I was arrested I do not believe that I was myself for a moment, until after I was over here in the jail. Everything about that time is a blur, a blank, to me.'
    On the Witness Stand
  5. 'I suppose I must have made those statements, since they all say I did. But I have no knowledge of having made them, and I am innocent of that crime.'
    On the Witness Stand
  6. He would have been absolutely unable to fabricate by his own efforts such scientifically exact observations.
    On the Witness Stand
  7. What resulted when he begun to fabricate out of his own faculties was sufficiently shown in his confessions, a contradictory mixture of improbable and psychologically impossible occurrences.
    On the Witness Stand
  8. Six days later the punishment of death was executed.
    On the Witness Stand
  9. A long detention before the trial, fatiguing examinations, constantly repeated suggestive questions, and especially threats and willfully applied emotional shocks are likely to produce in mentally weak individuals illusions and errors.
    Psychology General and Applied