Trickery and deceit: How the pragmatics of interrogation leads innocent people to confess – and factfinders to believe their confessions
-
Saul Kassin
Abstract
Beginning with the nonconfrontational suspect interview aimed at assessing truth and deception, through the guilt-presumptive process of interrogation aimed at eliciting an admission of guilt, to the construction of a post-admission narrative confession, the psychology of confessions requires an understanding of language. In particular, this chapter will focus on confrontational approaches to interrogation that deploy trickery and deceit to communicate promises and threats covertly, through pragmatic implication, thereby circumventing the laws of evidence that ban confessions elicited through psychological coercion. Research to be described shows that these covert forms of communication are “effective” at leading people to infer promises and threats, leading suspects to confess, and misleading juries to infer guilt. Research also describes why Miranda does not serve as an effective safeguard and hence why all interrogations should be video recorded in their entirety.
Abstract
Beginning with the nonconfrontational suspect interview aimed at assessing truth and deception, through the guilt-presumptive process of interrogation aimed at eliciting an admission of guilt, to the construction of a post-admission narrative confession, the psychology of confessions requires an understanding of language. In particular, this chapter will focus on confrontational approaches to interrogation that deploy trickery and deceit to communicate promises and threats covertly, through pragmatic implication, thereby circumventing the laws of evidence that ban confessions elicited through psychological coercion. Research to be described shows that these covert forms of communication are “effective” at leading people to infer promises and threats, leading suspects to confess, and misleading juries to infer guilt. Research also describes why Miranda does not serve as an effective safeguard and hence why all interrogations should be video recorded in their entirety.
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Contents VII
- Introduction: On lying and disleading 1
-
I Lies and deception: The landscape of falsehood
- Lying, deception, and related concepts: A conceptual map for ethics 15
- The morality of deception 41
- Kant tell an a priori lie 65
-
II Lying, deception, and speaker commitment: Empirical evidence
- Is lying morally different from misleading? An empirical investigation 89
- “I was only quoting”: Shifting viewpoint and speaker commitment 113
- Memefying deception and deceptive memefication: Multimodal deception on social media 139
-
III Puffery, bluffery, bullshit: How to not quite lie
- Bald-faced bullshit and authoritarian political speech: Making sense of Johnson and Trump 165
- Practice to deceive: A natural history of the legal bluff 195
- Just saying, just kidding: Liability for accountability-avoiding speech in ordinary conversation, politics and law 227
-
IV Crossing the perjury threshold: Deceit and falsehood in the courtroom
- Perjury cases and the linguist 261
- Trickery and deceit: How the pragmatics of interrogation leads innocent people to confess – and factfinders to believe their confessions 289
- The context of mistrust: Perjury ascriptions in the courtroom 309
- What counts as a lie in and out of the courtroom? The effect of discourse genre on lie judgments 353
- Lies, deception, and bullshit in law 381
- Index 409
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Contents VII
- Introduction: On lying and disleading 1
-
I Lies and deception: The landscape of falsehood
- Lying, deception, and related concepts: A conceptual map for ethics 15
- The morality of deception 41
- Kant tell an a priori lie 65
-
II Lying, deception, and speaker commitment: Empirical evidence
- Is lying morally different from misleading? An empirical investigation 89
- “I was only quoting”: Shifting viewpoint and speaker commitment 113
- Memefying deception and deceptive memefication: Multimodal deception on social media 139
-
III Puffery, bluffery, bullshit: How to not quite lie
- Bald-faced bullshit and authoritarian political speech: Making sense of Johnson and Trump 165
- Practice to deceive: A natural history of the legal bluff 195
- Just saying, just kidding: Liability for accountability-avoiding speech in ordinary conversation, politics and law 227
-
IV Crossing the perjury threshold: Deceit and falsehood in the courtroom
- Perjury cases and the linguist 261
- Trickery and deceit: How the pragmatics of interrogation leads innocent people to confess – and factfinders to believe their confessions 289
- The context of mistrust: Perjury ascriptions in the courtroom 309
- What counts as a lie in and out of the courtroom? The effect of discourse genre on lie judgments 353
- Lies, deception, and bullshit in law 381
- Index 409
