Beyond Good Cop/Bad Cop: A Look At Real-Life Interrogations
npr.org
npr.org
First was the fact of confession bias: even if unconsciously, once we've heard a confession, we tend to discount information which would contradict it. I've seen a similar general trend: if someone tells us something we tend to believe them, reality notwithstanding. People pay attention to words.
There's the PEACE model for ferreting out truth and falsehoods, which dismisses many of the "physical indicators of lying" notions:
That model is: Lying and anxiety have nothing to do with each other, and lying and body language have nothing to do with each other. However, lying creates a cognitive load, and the more you lie, the more elements you have to juggle, and if you keep going back and asking for more and more details, eventually that system breaks down. ... What the PEACE technique helps you do is find out which part of the story is verifiable and which part isn't.
I've found that cues of coherence and specificity in stories are helpful to me in assessing the veracity of both personal interactions and of academic / topical research.
In the interview, Douglas Starr also mentions the case of people who've appeared on TV or in public making appeals to find the perpetrator of crimes for which they were later convicted on evidence (and by all appearances accurately) -- the displays of emotion these people present don't show any of the physical signs of lying that the Reid method is based on.
And finally, the behavioral tricks employed by investigators and by which subjects operate which tend to result in false confessions are telling. The pressure to confess, and the sense of the subject that confessing will somehow make things better (it almost always doesn't) are both psychological traps which tend to produce a false result.
Even in areas far removed from law enforcement or interrogation, I see valuable lessons here.
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/507/c...
... and it's unfortunate because we put away an innocent person! I'd rather be stolen from a few times than interrogated, tried, and jailed.
As someone already commented, This American Life did an episode on confessions: one involves a woman who was coerced using the techniques described in the OP (the New Yorker piece goes into detail about her case)...and the other focuses on a teenage boy who refused to say anything, even decades later...both stories are incredible to listen to, the latter, especially, as the formerly accused man may have been the most Zen-accused-child-murdering-rapist in history:
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/507/c...
And another commenter has already pointed out the Don't Talk to Police video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc&feature=youtu.be
(I can't believe it only has 3 million page views given how often it's brought up in most techie/political threads)
Both the TAL and the Youtube are worth listening/watching...the latter provides the theory, the former provides the practice.