Bluffed by the Dealer: Distinguishing False Pleas from False Confessions

Plea negotiations and interrogations share several similarities. Often, an authority figure pressures the defendant to sign a legal document in an unduly-coercive environment that induces both guilty and innocent individuals to confess. Nevertheless, pleas and confessions are distinct. Pleas are methods of conviction, while confessions are forms of evidence; they occur at different times during the investigatory process; and the psychological processes underlying one’s decision to plea are different from those underlying one’s decision to confess. The overlap between pleas and confessions inspired this study of the “phenomenology of innocence”—that innocent people perceive their innocence as a shield from conviction. Each of 422 undergraduate students was randomly assigned to one of eight experimental conditions. The students completed three questionnaires. An experimenter posing as a participant persuaded the others to cheat. Experimenters later accused the participants of cheating and asked them either to sign a confession or accept a plea deal and provide their reason for doing so. Experimenters presented some with a “bluff condition” that a hidden camera could reveal their cheating. The guilty consistently both accepted pleas and signed confessions more frequently than the innocent. Though impact of the evidence-bluff was muted, the study provided some evidence that the factors driving pleas and confessions differed.

“When participants were confronted with the decision to sign the statement presented to them, the primary factors they considered differed by whether the statement was a plea deal or a confession. . . . [T]his pattern of results supports the supposition that true confessions are more internally motivated, while also revealing the possibility that true pleas (like false confessions) might be more externally motivated.” p. 167