Kassin and Kiechel's False Confession Experiment

In a 1996 study the psychologists Saul Kassin and Katherine Kiechel devised a laboratory paradigm to test whether an innocent person could be induced to confess falsely to something they had not done, inviting seventy-five undergraduate participants to complete what was described as a reaction-time typing task on a computer and warning them in advance not to press a particular key, the ALT key, because doing so would cause the program to crash and destroy the data. After roughly one minute the computer, secretly programmed by the researchers, appeared to crash on its own, and the experimenter accused each innocent participant of having caused the crash by pressing the forbidden key, sometimes reinforcing the accusation with a confederate who claimed to have witnessed the participant hit the key. Kassin and Kiechel found that a striking sixty-nine percent of participants signed a written statement admitting they had pressed the key, even though none of them actually had, and further found that some participants went beyond mere compliance, with about twenty-eight percent showing signs of genuinely internalizing belief in their own guilt and around nine percent confabulating specific false details of how they supposedly caused the crash. The study demonstrated experimentally that ordinary, psychologically healthy people can be led to confess to and even believe they committed an act they did not commit under relatively mild social and situational pressure, and it became a foundational laboratory paradigm for the study of false confessions and their implications for police interrogation practice and the justice system.