Interrogative suggestibility can be defined as ‘the extent to which, within a closed social interaction, people come to accept messages communicated during formal questioning, as the result of which their subsequent response is affected’ (Gudjonsson and Clark, 1986, p.84). Gudjonsson and Clark (1986) proposed a few distinguishing features of interrogative suggestibility. First, questioning process is involved relating to past events. Second, at lower range it has significant relationship with memory
Seeing that memories are fabricated by the mind, and can be influenced by suggestion, the Gudjonsson Suggestibility Scale (GSS) should be administered by psychologists to individuals to test for suggestibility. This should be done with those who's confession changes from "I didn't do it - I don't think I did it - I might have done it - I guess I did it - I did it" over the course of an interrogation. The reason for this would be the fact that false memories can develop in a high-stress situation
only the ‘tip of the iceberg’. It appears that young people are particularly vulnerable and often make false confessions in order to protect others. Standardized psychological tests have been devised in order to assess personality factors such as suggestibility and compliance that render some people more vulnerable than others. The reason people make false confessions is typically due to a combination of factors such as psychological vulnerabilities, nature of the custodial confinement and the police
Ever since DNA has been used in court cases, hundreds of people have been released from prison because DNA exonerated them from the eyewitness testimony that was given at trial that locked them up in the first place. Once news about this started getting out, how human memory was not as perfect as previously thought, many different studies have shown how easy it is to manipulate memory and create false memories to almost everyone. So when I received this assignment and had to research a topic involving
It can be said that it is better for ten guilty people to go free, than for one innocent person to suffer. In the cases of wrongly convicted individuals, one in four people are declared guilty and sentenced as a result of false confessions (Kopelman, M., 2013). As Brendan Dassey, from the documentary 'Making a Murderer' found out the hard way, convictions can be made just with a confession alone, even if that confession is false. Juries and the courts view confessions as the greatest form of evidence
There are several reasons to why people falsely confess to crimes. This will include different analysis from studies carried out by criminal psychologist in order to understand why certain people are prone to falsely confessing to crimes. There are different characteristics to understanding why people confess falsely confess to crimes such as; individual differences, personal and situational factors, and Ethnicity. This essay also aims to identify what leads certain individuals to confess to crimes
Thus an important reminder is that theory of reconstructive memory was developed by Bartlett based on this work. The theory nonetheless does not intent to discredit all memories, terming them as inaccurate. In fact, some researchers such as Gallo (2006) established that some reconstructed memories are usually very accurate. However, the instance of flashbulb memories being fully accurate are questionable, since as earlier mentioned, the great deal of emotion experienced during the actual occurrence