Does video recording inhibit crime suspects? Evidence from a fully randomized field experiment.

In partnership with a small city police department, we randomly informed or did not inform 122 crime suspects that their interrogations were being video-recorded. Coding of all sessions indicated that camera-informed suspects spoke as often and as much as did those who were not informed; they were as likely to waive Miranda at the outset and later; they were as likely to make admissions and confessions, not just denials; and they were perceived no differently by detectives on a range of dimensions. Looking at distal outcomes, we observed no differences in ultimate case dispositions. In terms of policy and practice, results did not support the hypothesis that recording-even when transparent, as required in 2-party consent states-inhibits suspects or alters case dispositions. At least for now, this conclusion is empirically limited to situations in which cameras are concealed and to interrogations that do not involve juveniles, homicides, or drug crimes, which we a priori excluded from our sample. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Fluctuating confidence: the dynamic consequences of true/false affirmatives and denials on how a listener appraises their personal past.

The present study examined the mnemonic consequences of true/false denials and affirmatives on how a listener appraises their personal past. To this end, participants (listeners) rated the extent to which they were confident certain events occurred during their childhood. They rated these events both before and after a confederate (speaker) denied or affirmed the occurrence of four different childhood events each, for a total of eight "rehearsed" events. For each set (denials and affirmatives) of events, half were true and half were false. In turn, this created four types of events (two each): true denials, true affirmatives, false denials, and false affirmatives. Additionally, half of the participants were told that the speaker was provided independent information about the veracity of the event's occurrence ("expert" condition). Overall, listeners were less confident in the occurrence of false denial events, but more so when they believed the speaker to be more knowledgeable of the listeners memories, more confident in false affirmative events and, counter intuitively, more confident in the occurrence of true denial events. These results underscore the importance of a nuanced approach to the mnemonic consequences of true and false denials and affirmations in the course of social interactions.