WAS IT YOU WHO DID THAT?
From some wrong conviction cases, it has been discovered that “If you’re convinced for a few hours that you have committed a crime, you’ll accept that even if you haven’t done anything.”
Earlier, a team of lawyers and statisticians stated that the so-called
criminals which have been sentenced to death in the US were falsely convicted!
In order to investigate, a study was led by Julia Shaw, a psychological
scientist from Bedfordshire University, UK. She found that if people are questioned in
the right way, even the innocents can fabricate in such a way that they can
falsely convince themselves that they have committed a crime.
Over a period of few hours, an adult can be convinced that they committed a
crime as serious as a teenager assaulting with a weapon.
The studies involved three adult suspects being interviewed. They were
questioned for at least 3 hours and in such a way that made them believe that
they have committed a big crime and made them confess despite that they were
innocent. Isn’t this uncanny?
We all might be thinking- “Try this on me and I’ll prove this fact wrong!” But
this is not the case.
For further study, Julia and her co-author, a forensic psychologist of the
University of British Columbia, Stephen Porter enlisted 60 Canadian
undergraduate students who were questioned and interviewed for three rounds, 40
minutes each to find out if they were manipulated and made to believe that they
committed a crime. The results were so astonishing that out of the 30
students who have been falsely told that they committed a crime as a teenager,
21 out of them (70 percent) came to believe it, including 11 out of the 20 who
were told to believe that it was an assault. Those 21 students not only
believed that they committed a crime, by the end of the third day, they were also
providing details of the crime also including the details of their interview
they had with the police.
That’s so mind-blowing, isn’t it?
“Every
journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false
namings of real events.”
-Andrienne Rich
Amazing blog
ReplyDeleteThankyou!
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