Feeling guilty: Little effect on false confession rate

DOI

In two experiments, we tested the hypothesis that guilt feelings would elevate the probability of making a false confession. In Experiment 1 (N = 146), a confederate induced guilt feelings by asking participants to cheat on a task. The experimenter then falsely accused participants of having pressed a forbidden key, causing a computer crash. In Experiment 2 (N = 108), a confederate was punished every time participants could not answer a quiz question. The confederate later cheated in a game and asked participants to take the blame. In Experiment 1, 100 participants (68.5%) falsely confessed to pressing the key. In Experiment 2, 39 participants (36.1%) falsely confessed to cheating. Guilt manipulations had no effect on false confession rates. When exploring the effect of guilt feelings, five of eight tests were statistically non-significant. As yet, there is insufficient evidence to argue that guilt feelings are a major determinant of false confessions.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.34894/YRLQZ0
Metadata Access https://dataverse.nl/oai?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_datacite&identifier=doi:10.34894/YRLQZ0
Provenance
Creator Schneider, Teresa ORCID logo; Sauerland, Melanie ORCID logo; Grady, Laura; Leistra, Aniek; van Lier, Stephanie; Merckelbach, Harald ORCID logo
Publisher DataverseNL
Contributor Schneider, Teresa; faculty data manager FPN
Publication Year 2020
Rights info:eu-repo/semantics/restrictedAccess
OpenAccess false
Contact Schneider, Teresa (Maastricht University); faculty data manager FPN (Maastricht University)
Representation
Resource Type Experimental data; Dataset
Format application/x-spss-sav
Size 6059; 16127
Version 1.0
Discipline Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Aquaculture; Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Aquaculture and Veterinary Medicine; Life Sciences; Social Sciences; Social and Behavioural Sciences; Soil Sciences