Voluntary false confessions: Who would do that?
Photo by Krystian Olszanski
By Teresa Schneider, Jenny Schell-Leugers and Melanie Sauerland
This blog was originally published in German at de.in-mind.org.
Surveys show that taking the blame for someone else happens frequently, mostly for minor offences. In this blog, we look at who people take the blame for.
Voluntary false confessions occur without external pressure from the police. One of the motives is to protect the real perpetrator. For example, in 2001, the German actor Günther Kaufmann confessed to killing a befriended tax consultant and received a 15-year prison sentence for aggravated extortion resulting in death. It later became clear that the lover of Kaufmann's wife had committed the crime together with two accomplices and that Kaufmann's wife had ordered the murder. Kaufmann had confessed to save his terminally ill wife from a prison sentence. Kaufmann was released two years into the prison sentence and acquitted (Otto, 2006). Such voluntary false confessions are difficult to detect because the confessor has no motivation to reveal the error. This was also the case in Kaufmann's case; it was not him who provided the critical cue, but the girlfriend of one of the real perpetrators. What drives people to make such a confession?
The relationship between the false confessor and the guilty person is one important factor. In one experimental study, participants imagined that a family member, close friend, or an acquaintance asked them to accept a penalty for a traffic offence. Participants were more willing to take the blame if they imagined a family member or close friend in the scenario, compared with acquaintances (Schneider et al., 2021). Surveys among students also suggest that the relationship with the guilty person plays an important role: two-thirds of those who had ever taken the blame for someone had done so for a friend or partner (Willard et al., 2015). Mostly, these admissions concerned minor offenses such as cheating, disorderly conduct, or theft.
Surveys in prisons and forensic hospitals also suggest that voluntary false confessions to protect someone else occur at least as often as false confessions due to police pressure. In a German study, 63% of respondents who indicated that they had once falsely confessed said that the motive was to protect the guilty person. In contrast, only 25% mentioned interrogation pressure as a motive (Volbert et al., 2019). It remains an open question whether false confessions also arise due to a combination of interrogation pressure and the desire to protect another person.
References
Otto, H. D. (2006). Im Namen des Irrtums! Fehlurteile in Mordprozessen [In the name of error! Wrongful convictions in murder trials]. Herbig.
Schneider, T., Sauerland, M., Merckelbach, H., Puschke, J., & Cohrs, J. C. (2021). Self-reported voluntary blame-taking: Kinship before friendship and no effect of incentives, Frontiers in Psychology, 12, Article 621960. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.621960
Volbert, R., May, L., Hausam, J., & Lau, S. (2019). Confessions and denials when guilty and innocent: Forensic patients’ self-reported behavior during police interviews. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 10, Article 168. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2019.00168
Willard, J., Madon, S., & Curran, T. (2015). Taking blame for other people’s misconduct. Behavioral Science and the Law, 33(6), 771–783. https://doi.org/10.1002/bsl.2164