People Can Be Convinced They Committed a Crime That Never Happened
People Can Be Convinced They Committed a Crime That Never Happened
Lab-based research shows that adults can be convinced, over the course of a few hours, that as teens they perpetrated crimes that never actually occurred.
Good time to reiterate - Never talk to the police. They are not your friend. Anything you say will be used against you. They will do anything they can get away with to get an admission, or just steal your property because they can.
Don't Talk to The Police (lecture featuring a lawyer and a retired cop detailing why it will never help to talk).
That's outdated advice.
It doesn't matter if you don't talk, because the police will join your social media and chat groups and keep asking their questions for years until they get the answers they like.
The difference is that we are living in an extremely invasive surveillance state.
Do you have an article about that?
Unless they get access to your unlocked phone (in which case you already fucked up the "don't talk to the police" part) how would they get invites or know who to talk to?
Real police work isn't like the movies.
Unless you've murdered the Governor's daughter, police will not follow you around on social media for years trying to catch you slip.
False confessions are a serious problem and the police should not be allowed to lie their asses off, but they are in many places like the US (which coincidentally has ridiculous prison stats and a for profit prison system that's pretty much legalized slavery, happy Juneteenth I guess).
Literally legalized slavery in most states. The 13th Amendment explicitly allows slavery as punishment for a crime. Some states have amended their own constitutions to remove that wording, but only a few.
The researchers are hoping the state will read this paper and go "Wait, we can do that? That's awful! It hinders our pursuit of real justice and hampers our ability to lock up the actual criminals! We should change!"
What they're actually going to say is "Wait, we can do that? FUCK yeah! Let's get that 100% conviction rate, boys!"
There is a documentary on Netflix called "The Confession Tapes", where people confessed, on the record, that they committed crimes, when other evidences showed that it was impossible for them to have committed them.
I remember a brutal child murder case from the 1980s where the police had no leads. The public pressure was enormous because stuff like this doesn't usually happen here at all.
Oddly enough, more than 10 people turned themselves in claiming to have done it. I really don't get what makes people do that.
Eventually one of them was charged for it, but I'm not sure he actually did it. He was a mentally challenged guy, and the only reason he stood out from the others was that he confirmed some details that the others didn't. There was no physical evidence, and I think that if he had done it, there would be, because he was too dumb to get rid of it. He even had an alibi.
It's very likely that his memory was formed from the questioning, or that he was just parroting the authority, like most mentally patients do.
I once had a dream where I went to jail, and it felt extremely real. When I woke up it took a while to shake it and weeks later I would think back to it and it still felt very real and sometimes took me a while to decide if it was a real memory or not. It was to the point where I considered jumping online to research it. Definitely a weird experience, but can see how it could be easy to convince yourself that a memory is real.
I just finished listening to the podcast 'The Coldest Case in Laramie' which featured a possible false confession. I really enjoyed the podcast.
From personal experience, depends on brain development but I don't see it as possible, intellectualism/Environment/Lifestyle will play key roles.
Edit:
Okays there are red flags in the comments that should be addressed:
Beware of representational trauma & the dissociation that builds up from it.
Be sceptical of those that reinforce those patterns, they are a precursor for someone else pursuit of power.