Not accepting students for Fall 2025
Research Topics:
Psychology of wrongful conviction: Police interviewing, interrogations, false confessions, forensic confirmation biases, guilty pleas.
Current Projects/Research Interests
1. Causes of False Confessions
- Identifying suspects
- Deception Detection
- “Implicit profiling”
- Pre-Interrogation
- Perceptions of Custody
- Miranda and waivers
- Reid technique interrogation
- False Evidence ploy and bluffs
- Minimization tactics
- Phenomenology of innocence
2. Consequences of False Confessions
- Confessions
- Format, language, content, rehearsal, and contamination
- Parole boards and post-conviction
- Investigation – Confirmation Biases
- Forensic science experts
- Eyewitnesses, alibis informants
- Adjudication
- Guilty pleas, Alford pleas
- Trials (judges, juries)
- Post-exoneration
- Stigma effects
- Prosecutorial misconduct
3. Remedies of False Confessions
- Video recording interrogations
- Effects on police, suspects, juries
- Expert testimony
- Alternative methods of interrogation
- PEACE and investigative interviewing
Recent Publications
Cardenas, S. A., Sanchez, P., & Kassin, S. M. (2023). The “partial innocence” effect: False guilty pleas to partially unethical behaviors. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
Alceste, F., Sanchez, P. Y., Luke, T., Dalsklev, M., Rizzelli, L., & Kassin, S. M. (2023). Practice makes perfect: Effects of mere rehearsal on lay judgments of confessions. Psychology, Crime, and Law.
Hellgren, J., & Kassin, S. M. (2022). The defense lawyer’s plea recommendation: Disentangling the influences of perceived guilt and probability of conviction. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 28, 546–559.
Kassin, S. M., Cardenas, S. A., Meterko, V., & Barksdale, F. J. (2022). Prosecutorial misconduct: Assessment of perspectives from the bench. Court Review, 58 (4), 112-118.
Kassin, S. (2022). Duped: Why innocent people confess – and why we believe their confessions. Prometheus Books.
Kassin, S. (Ed.) (2022). Pillars of social psychology: Stories and retrospectives. Cambridge University Press.
Kassin, S. M. (2022). It’s time to bury three justice-corrupting myths once and for all. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 11, 161-165.
Alceste, F. & Kassin, S., M. (2021). Perceptions of custody: Similarities and disparities among police, judges, social psychologists, and laypeople. Law and Human Behavior, 45(3), 197.
Alceste, F., Luke, T. J., Redlich, A. D., Hellgren, J., & Amrom, A. D. (2021). The psychology of confessions: A comparison of expert and lay opinions. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 35(1), 39-51.
Rizzelli, L., Kassin, S.M., & Gales, T. (2021). The language of criminal confessions: A corpus analysis of confessions presumed true vs. proven false. Wrongful Conviction Law Review, 2 (3), 205-225.
Kukucka, J., Hiley, A., & Kassin, S.M. (2020). Forensic Confirmation Bias: Do Jurors Discount Examiners Who Were Exposed to Task‐Irrelevant Information? Journal Forensic Science, 65(6), 1978-1990.
Scherr, K. C., Redlich, A. D., & Kassin, S. M., (2020). Cumulative disadvantage: A psychological framework for understanding how innocence can lead to confession, wrongful conviction, and beyond. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 15(2), 353- 383.
Geven, L., Ben-Shakhar, G., Kassin, S., & Verschuere, B. (2020). Distinguishing true from false confessions using physiological patterns of concealed information recognition: A proof of concept study. Biological Psychology, 154, 107902.
Alceste, F., Jones, K., & Kassin, S. M. (2020). Facts only the perpetrator could have known? A study of contamination in mock crime interrogations. Law and Human Behavior, 44, 128-142.
Scherr, K., C., Redlich, A. D., & Kassin, S. M. (2020). Cumulative disadvantage: A psychological framework for understanding how innocence can lead to confession, wrongful conviction, and beyond. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 15, 353-383.
