In a study, almost 70 percent of sleep-deprived people admitted to something they didn't do.
No surprise to those who have been paying attention to the interrogation tactics employed by PDs all over the US and have produced huge numbers of wrongful convictions. From the National Academy of Sciences:
”False confessions occur surprisingly frequently in the context of interrogations and criminal investigations. Indeed, false confessions are thought to account for approximately 15–25% of wrongful convictions in the United States. Here we demonstrate that sleep deprivation increases the likelihood that a person will falsely confess to wrongdoing that never occurred.”
Smithsonian writer Adam Hoffman explains:
So what motivates people facing more serious charges to confess to something they didn't do?
“There are two types of false confessions that come about from police interrogation,” says Saul Kassin, a professor of psychology at Williams College who reviewed the study before publication. The first is a compliant false confession.
“These are situations in which people who know they are innocent reach their breaking point,” he says. “They are under stress and will do whatever it takes to escape the immediate short-term punishing situation—even if it involves a possible negative consequence later.”
The second is an internalized false confession, in which the innocent person not only confesses but actually starts to believe their own guilt.
“The police are allowed to lie to people,” says Loftus. “They tell them that their fingerprints were at the scene when they weren’t, that they flunked a polygraph when they didn’t, that an eye witness saw them do it when there is no such person. And these are powerful ways of getting people to believe what they are confessing to.”
Read more: www.smithsonianmag.com/...