Aim of the Present Thesis and Outline of Chapters

The way in which jurors process confession evidence is an under-researched area of forensic psychology, as it is assumed that jurors simply accept all confessions, and the onus must therefore be on stopping false confessions from occurring in the first place. While some researchers have discussed the ways in which jurors are prone to ignoring confession

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inconsistencies (Malloy & Lamb, 2010), emerging research has indicated that jurors might allocate more cognitive resources to scrutinizing confession evidence, and be less inclined to believe poor quality confessions, than previously thought (Henderson & Levett, 2016; Palmer et al., 2016; Woestehoff & Meissner, 2016).

The aim of this thesis is to present a cohesive series of studies that investigate how confessions influence perceptions of suspect guilt, with special focus on those circumstances in which jurors question the veracity of poor quality confessions, and the attributes that make jurors more likely to draw the distinction between acceptable and questionable confessions.

To achieve this, the thesis is divided into two sections – one experimental, and one

methodological. The studies described in Chapters 2 and 3 experimentally test how jurors process confession inconsistencies and how these inconsistencies then influence their judgment of suspect guilt. Chapters 4 and 5 also use experimental studies to test scales that measure the beliefs and behaviors of individuals that could influence juror decision making.

In Chapter 2, we first tested whether jurors were able to notice inconsistencies in a confession, as the overriding belief that all confessions are true might stop jurors from being able to recognize/detect that the confession contained inconsistencies. Second, we tested whether the type of inconsistency moderated any effect of inconsistency on jurors’

perceptions of suspect guilt. Findings showed that jurors could perceive the consistency of a confession, but that inconsistencies only reduced judgments of guilt if the inconsistency took the form of a factual error (in which the suspect got key facts of the crime wrong in their confession). When the inconsistency took the form of contradictions (in which the suspect contradicted themselves throughout their confession), there was no reduction in the

perception of suspect guilt in comparison to a confession that contained no contradictions.

The following article has been submitted and a revised version is under review:

Holt, G. A., & Palmer, M. A. The variable influence of confession inconsistencies.

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The findings from the publication described in Chapter 2, led to the experimental research described in the publication comprising Chapter 3. This publication further breaks down the effect of factual errors on judgments of guilt, by testing whether the direction of the errors contributes to the effect. That is, do errors that increase the severity of the crime (those that appear to make the suspect look worse), have a differential effect to those errors that appear to decrease the severity of the crime (those that make the suspect look better).

Findings showed that inconsistencies in general acted to reduce judgments of guilt through the mediating variable of perceived confession consistency. However, if jurors perceived that the suspect might be deliberately getting the facts of the crime wrong in a way that appeared to reduce crime severity, then they were more likely to perceive the suspect as guilty of the crime. This exploratory finding has the potential to explain a portion of the variance in the effect of inconsistencies on juror perceptions of suspect guilt (i.e., why jurors sometimes convict based on factually incorrect confessions, and sometimes reject them).

The following article has been submitted for peer review:

Holt, G. A., & Palmer, M. A. Directional errors in confessions: Comparing the effects of under– and overstating crime severity

Chapter 4 is a methodological paper, testing the suggestion that some jurors will scrutinize evidence to a greater degree than others because of an innate inclination to engage with cognitively challenging tasks, measured using the well-known Need for Cognition scale.

Previous research has linked scores on the Need for Cognition scale to juror decision making, but none have specifically investigated whether juror processing of inconsistent confession evidence is moderated by a juror’s self-reported need for cognition.

This publication is in preparation for future submission:

Chapter 1: Introduction 19

Holt, G. A., & Palmer, M. A. Need for Cognition and juror processing of inconsistent confessions.

Chapter 5 tested a published, but previously untested scale that purported to identify individuals who supported coercive interrogation techniques, as well as those who believed that confessions could be coerced from an innocent suspect. Participants were presented with a confession interview transcript, similar to those used in Chapters 2 and 3 where a suspect confessed to a physical assault charge. In addition to completing questions about belief in suspect guilt, participants completed the Attitudes Toward Coerced Confessions scale (Clark, Boccaccini, & Turner, 2010). Findings showed that the scale could accurately predict which participants would be unconcerned by coercive interrogation techniques when judging guilt, and those who would have reduced perceptions of suspect guilt when the suspect gave an inconsistent confession that could be indicative of innocence.

The following article has been submitted for peer review:

Holt, G. A., & Palmer, M. A. The predictive validity of the Attitudes Toward Coerced Confessions scale

Together, these four chapters contribute to our theoretical understanding of why jurors make differential decisions based on inconsistent confession evidence, while providing a methodological understanding of how we can better predict and test individual factors that contribute to judgments of suspect guilt.

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