Hassel & Kassin Confessions and Eyewitness Identification
Hassel and Kassin set out to find out if a confession could affect other evidence in a crime investigation. In law the presumption is that different pieces of evidence are independent from each other, this study challenged this presumption. It was known that false confessions led to 25% of wrongful convictions. This could come about in three ways: police could target the wrong person from interrogation, the innocence would waive their Miranda rights and confess given false evidence, and false confessions can sway judges and juries. Hasel and Kassin wanted to know if this could be reproduced in a study and proven. Their study used a staged theft and had their subjects identify the thief from a lineup which did not include the thief. Participants were told that a certain person had made a confession or denied guilt. It turned out that those who had chosen someone but were told someone else made a confession 61% changed their mind about who committed the crime, while those who had not yet made a identification 50% selected the confessor when they knew who they were. …show more content…
They were asked to examine a line up and tell the experimenter: who if any of these people stole the laptop. Then they were asked to rate their confidence from one to ten. In the second phase of the study two days later, 237 students returned and were told based on what they had said when questioned about the line up. They were told that the person they identified confessed, that all suspects denied guilt, the suspect identified had denied involvement or a particular suspect had confessed. After this subjects again rated their confidence from a scale from one to ten. This gave researchers a broad view of what could happen in many different scenarios and gave them a control to test against their results (Hassel & Kassin,