Is The Bluff Enough? Examining The Effect Of Different Variants Of False Evidence On False Confessions

At present, the majority of false confessions are the result of psychologically manipulative interrogation tactics. Interrogators may use the false evidence ploy or the bluff ploy to elicit confessions. Unfortunately, research suggests that these interrogation tactics increase the risk of false confessions. At this time, research on the differential impact of the false evidence ploy and the bluff ploy is inconclusive, and there is little known about whether certain variants of false evidence are differentially powerful in eliciting false confessions. The present study examined the following: 1) the differential effect of the false evidence ploy and the bluff ploy on false confessions, and 2) the differential effect of three variants of false evidence on false confessions. The present study used a 2 (ploy: false evidence vs. bluff) by 3 (evidence variant: photograph vs. physical vs. eyewitness) between-subjects design. Participants (N=218) completed a logical reasoning task on a computer and were accused of violating the experimental protocol by pressing the space bar and seeing the answer. Participants were either shown faked (false) evidence, or told this evidence could be examined at a later date (bluff), and were then prompted to sign a confession statement. Results demonstrated that participants in the photograph evidence condition were more likely to falsely confess and to internalize guilt than participants in the physical evidence condition and eyewitness testimony condition. Results also demonstrated that participants in the false evidence condition were more likely to falsely confess and internalize guilt than participants in the bluff condition. The policy implications of these findings are discussed.

Is The Bluff Enough? Examining The Effect Of Different Variants Of False Evidence On False Confessions

At present, the majority of false confessions are the result of psychologically manipulative interrogation tactics. Interrogators may use the false evidence ploy or the bluff ploy to elicit confessions. Unfortunately, research suggests that these interrogation tactics increase the risk of false confessions. At this time, research on the differential impact of the false evidence ploy and the bluff ploy is inconclusive, and there is little known about whether certain variants of false evidence are differentially powerful in eliciting false confessions. The present study examined the following: 1) the differential effect of the false evidence ploy and the bluff ploy on false confessions, and 2) the differential effect of three variants of false evidence on false confessions. The present study used a 2 (ploy: false evidence vs. bluff) by 3 (evidence variant: photograph vs. physical vs. eyewitness) between-subjects design. Participants (N=218) completed a logical reasoning task on a computer and were accused of violating the experimental protocol by pressing the space bar and seeing the answer. Participants were either shown faked (false) evidence, or told this evidence could be examined at a later date (bluff), and were then prompted to sign a confession statement. Results demonstrated that participants in the photograph evidence condition were more likely to falsely confess and to internalize guilt than participants in the physical evidence condition and eyewitness testimony condition. Results also demonstrated that participants in the false evidence condition were more likely to falsely confess and internalize guilt than participants in the bluff condition. The policy implications of these findings are discussed.

Baseball fans don’t like lumpy batters: Influence of domain knowledge on the access of subordinate meanings

Two experiments investigated the effects of domain knowledge on the resolution of ambiguous words with dominant meanings related to baseball. When placed in a sentence context that strongly biased toward the non-baseball meaning (positive evidence), or excluded the baseball meaning (negative evidence), baseball experts had more difficulty than non-experts resolving the ambiguity. Sentence contexts containing positive evidence supported earlier resolution than did the negative evidence condition for both experts and non-experts. These experiments extend prior findings, and can be seen as support for the reordered access model of lexical access, where both prior knowledge and discourse context influence the availability of word meanings.

Evidence, Ethics & Social Policy Dilemmas

Within the philosophy of the social sciences, the relationship between evidence, ethics, and social policy is in need of further analysis. The present paper is an attempt to argue that while important social policies can, and perhaps ought to be, grounded in ethical theory, they are seldom articulated in this fashion due to the ambiguity surrounding the "evidence condition." Using a consequentialist-utilitarian framework, and a case study of a policy dilemma, the authors analyze the difficulties associated with resolving policy-based dilemmas which must appeal to evidential support as a justification for an ethical stand. Implication for the relevance of ethics to social policy formulation are discussed in detail.

On Basic Knowledge and Justification

Robert F. Almeder believes he has discovered a ‘pressing problem': ‘stating the conditions under which we determine whether a person's basic belief is true without introducing an evidence condition for knowledge’. He believes further that this is ‘a problem needing resolution before any ultimately satisfying explication of basic knowledge can be offered’.My aim is to show that Almeder has failed to discover any problem at all, but I begin by asking: how could the question how we determine the (mere) truth of another's basic belief (regardless of how we do so) have any bearing on the correct explication of the concept of basic knowledge?

Basic Knowledge and Jusificaton

As an introduction to explicating the concept of basic knowledge, I shall examine Aristotle's argument for the existence of basic knowledge and urge two basic points. The first point is that Aristotle's argument, properly viewed, establishes the existence of a kind of knowledge, basic or non-demonstrative knowledge, the definition of which does not require the specification of, and hence the satisfaction of,anyevidence condition. This point has been urged by philosophers like Peirce and Austin but it needs further argumentation because most analytic epistemologists still insist (for reasons that we shall see) thatallknowledge, whether basic or non-basic, requires the satisfaction of some evidence condition. Secondly, to urge (as Wittgenstein and Dewey have done) that the basic propositions whose existence is established by Aristotle's argument could be privileged but not known, for the reason that there is no evidence condition for them, would be to adopt a position that either entails wholesale skepticism or undermines the basic distinction between knowledge and belief.