Sunday, November 4, 2018

The Horrors of False Confession


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People can break like a pencil. Too much pressure and they will break in half. So when someone is being tortured verbally for something they did not do, they might confess to doing that action. People break under pressure and will try to get away from the source of pressure. It is a basic human response.  Psychological scientist and lead researcher Julia Shaw of the University of Bedfordshire in the UK did a study on interrogations and she said, "Our findings show that false memories of committing crime with police contact can be surprisingly easy to generate, and can have all the same kinds of complex details as real memories,". So when under intense interrogation, someone might confess to doing the action they were accused of. Why? Because it is a basic human action of "Fight or Flight", and they chose "Flight", or confessing falsely due to the interrogation techniques they might have used in this situation.

In "The Crucible", you can see examples of people falsely confessing in being apart of the witch situation that is occurring in Salem. The people in the town of Salem are scared of the situation, and when any blame is put on them, they try to push it off to someone else. So when Hale comes in to help solve the situation, his interrogation techniques make the people of Salem sometimes falsely confess. It can be a scary thing because your livelihood and your life itself are at stake. But some will crack under the pressure, and they will hope that with God they can be pure again, even though they did nothing wrong and their faith is still strong. It is a scary thing, and all of this fear is spreading throughout Salem and its people. It makes all the people question, "Do I have a part in this?". This situation can be serious in today's world too. That's why there are many horrors in false confessions and can be a very big problem in bringing justice to those that are actually guilty.

Source: https://americanvision.org/14201/study-on-false-confessions-shocker-why-the-innocent-should-not-talk-to-police/


1 comment:

  1. I agree with the fact that in the text and in real life individuals often use the flight approach when they are verbally pressured. In order to further your argument you could add a paragraph about current examples of this to show how it is still a phenomena that occurs in today's world

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