Facts only the perpetrator could have known? A study of contamination in mock crime interrogations.

OBJECTIVE: This paper examines contamination in interrogations: the process by which an interrogator divulges privileged information to a suspect. HYPOTHESES: In Experiment 1, we predicted that mock investigators would communicate critical crime details when they interview mock suspects about a crime-and that innocent and guilty suspects alike would later produce confessions that contained these details. In Experiment 2, we hypothesized that observers who listened only to the confessions would exhibit a greater guilt bias than those who also had exposure to the eliciting interview. METHOD: Experiment 1 (N = 59) used student participants in a mock crime scenario to test whether contamination is natural to communication even in the absence of external incentives. In Experiment 2, MTurk participants (N = 499) listened to audio-clips from Experiment 1 to test whether presenting observers with the full interview decreases guilt ratings for false confessors. RESULTS: Investigators divulged crime information to both innocent and guilty suspects, and even false confessions later included accurate details. Although Experiment 2 observers exhibited a guilt bias, exposure to the interview (not just the confession) attenuated this effect for innocent confessors. CONCLUSIONS: The information disclosure associated with contamination is a normal cognitive process that occurs even without external incentives to secure a confession. Experiment 2 showed that seeing contamination in action may decrease judgments of guilt for innocent suspects. Interrogations should be recorded in their entirety to provide fact finders with an objective record of the source of crime details contained within narrative confessions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Look there! The effect of perspective, attention, and instructions on how people understand recorded police encounters.

Now more than ever, body cameras, surveillance footage, dash-cam footage, and bystanders with phones enable people to see for themselves officer and civilian behavior and determine the justifiability of officers' actions. This paper examines whether the camera perspective from which people watch police encounters influences the conclusions that people draw. Consistent with recent findings showing that body camera footage leads people to perceive officers' actions as less intentional (Turner, Caruso, Dilich, & Roese, 2019), our first study demonstrates that participants who watched body-camera footage, compared with people who watched surveillance footage of the same encounter, perceived the officer's behavior as being more justified and made more lenient punishment decisions. In our second study, only one of the four police encounters that participants watched led participants to perceive the officer more favorably when they watched body-camera footage compared with bystander footage. Our results demonstrate that some body-camera footage-specifically videos that capture an officer using his or her body to apprehend a civilian-can lead to biased perceptions of police encounters that benefit the officer. Our findings suggest that this occurs because: (i) in body-camera footage, the civilian is the more easily visible figure, thus making less salient the officer's role in the encounter; and (ii) the body camera-attached to an officer's uniform-is unable to adequately capture certain use of force movements that are important in determining an officer's intent.