Saul Kassin

Biography

Saul Kassin is an American psychologist, born and raised in New York City. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa as an undergraduate from Brooklyn College in New York City, where he studied implicit learning with cognitive psychologist and mentor Arthur S. Reber. He then received his Ph.D. in personality and social psychology from the University of Connecticut in Storrs, Connecticut, where he studied attribution theory with Charles A. "Skip" Lowe. With his doctoral degree he went on to begin his psychology and law research career working with Lawrence Wrightsman at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas, for one year and then taught at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, for two years before starting at Williams College, where he spent most of his career, and ultimately moving to John Jay.

In 1984, he was awarded the U.S. Supreme Court Judicial Fellowship and worked at the Federal Judicial Center in Washington, DC. In 1985, worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University in their Psychology and Law Program. Kassin went on to author several books, including: Psychology, Essentials of Psychology, Developmental Social Psychology (with Sharon S. Brehm and Frederick X. Gibbons), The Psychology of Evidence and Trial Procedure (with Lawrence S. Wrightsman), The American jury on trial: psychological perspectives (with Lawrence S. Wrightsman), and Confessions in the Courtroom (with Lawrence S. Wrightsman). He is also co-author of the textbook Social Psychology with Steven Fein and Hazel Rose Markus, now in its eleventh edition.[2]

Kassin is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association (APA), the Association for Psychological Science (APS), and the American Psychology-Law Society (AP-LS). Although he has published research in the social psychology of attribution theory, jury decision-making, and eyewitness testimony, Kassin is best known for his groundbreaking work on false confessions. In 2007, he received a Presidential Award from the APA for this research. In 2011, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Investigative Interviewing Research Group (iiiRG). In 2014, he received an Award for Distinguished Contribution from AP-LS. In 2017, he received an Award for Lifetime Contribution from the European Association of Psychology and the Law (EAPL). In 2017, he also received the Award for Distinguished Contribution for Research on Public Policy from the American Psychological Association (APA).[3][4] In 2021, he will receive the James McKeen Cattell Lifetime Achievement Award for Applied Research from APS.

Kassin was the president of Division 41 of APA, a.k.a. AP-LS. He continues to teach, research, write, and lecture to judges, lawyers, law enforcement groups, psychologists, psychiatrists, and other high interest groups in the area of social psychology and the law. He has appeared as a guest analyst on all major TV networks and many syndicated news shows. He also appears in a number of podcasts, such as APA's "Speaking of Psychology: False confessions aren’t always what they seem",[5] and documentaries such as the 2012 film by Ken and Sarah Burns, The Central Park Five. Determined to raise public awareness, Kassin has also written some high-profile opinion editorials[6][7][8][9] and a provocative article on the false confessions that surrounded the infamous 1964 killing of Kitty Genovese.[10]

A staunch critic of the Reid technique of interrogation,[11][12] and a vocal advocate for the requirement that all interrogations be videotaped, Kassin is best known for pioneering the scientific study of false confessions. In 1985, he and Lawrence Wrightsman introduced a taxonomy that distinguished three types of false confessions—voluntary, coerced-compliant, and coerced-internalized.[13] This classification scheme is universally accepted in the field.

Kassin also created the first laboratory research methods (the most notable being the computer crash experiment,[14] used in forensic psychology to study the problems with certain types of police interrogation techniques and why innocent people confess. With other experts in the field, he wrote a 2010 White Paper called "Police-Induced Confessions: Risk Factors and Recommendations."[15] To assess the consensus of opinions within the scientific community, he and his colleagues recently published a survey of confession experts from all over the world.[16]

Over the years, Kassin has published many other empirical articles on the subject of confessions and has introduced such terms as positive coercion bias,[17] minimization and maximization,[18] guilt-presumptive interrogation,[19] the phenomenology of innocence,[20] and the forensic confirmation bias.[21] In recent articles, he explains why judges, juries, and others tend to believe false confessions even when they are contradicted by DNA and other evidence.[22][23] Kassin has also long advocated for the mandatory video recording of suspect interviews and interrogations—in their entirety and without exception. With funding support from the National Science Foundation, he and his colleagues conducted a series of experiments on the effects of video recording on police, suspects, and lay fact finders, including the first fully randomized field experiment involving actual suspects. The results have all been published.[24][25][26]

Kassin's work is cited all over the world, including by the U.S. Supreme Court and the Supreme Courts of Canada and Israel. He has worked on many high-profile cases and has worked with the Innocence Project to use psychology to help prevent and correct wrongful convictions. He has testified as an expert witness in state, federal, and military courts. Kassin was recently the subject of a feature article in SCIENCE.[27]

References
  1. "Biography". Williams College. Retrieved 2009-07-24.
  2. Kassin, S., Fein, S., & Markus, H. (2021). Social psychology (11th edition). Belmont, CA: Cengage Learning.
  3. "American Psychological Association Awards for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest".
  4. Award for Distinguished Contributions to Research in Public Policy: Saul M. Kassin (2017). Citation and Biography. American Psychologist, 72, 948-950.
  5. http://www.apa.org/research/action/speaking-of-psychology/false-confessions.aspx
  6. Kassin, S. (2002). False confessions and the jogger case. The New York Times OP-ED, Nov. 1, 2002, p. A31.
  7. Kassin, S. (2018). Why SCOTUS should examine the case of "Making a Murderer’s" Brendan Dassey. APA online June 12, 2018.
  8. Kassin, S., & Thompson, D. (2019). Videotape all police interrogations – Justice demands it. The New York Times OP-ED, August 1, 2019.
  9. Kassin, S. (2021). It’s time for police to stop lying to suspects. The New York Times OP-ED, January 30, 2021, p. A23.https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/29/opinion/false-confessions-police-interrogation.html?searchResultPosition=1
  10. Kassin, S. M. (2017). The killing of Kitty Genovese: What else does this case tell us? Perspectives on Psychological Science, 12, 374–381.
  11. Kassin, S. (1997). The psychology of confession evidence. American Psychologist, 52, 221-233.
  12. Starr, D. (2013). The Interview. The New Yorker, December 9, 2013.
  13. Kassin, S. & Wrightsman, L. (1985). Confession evidence. In Kassin & Wrightsman (Eds.), The psychology of evidence and trial procedure. Beverly Hills: Sage.
  14. Kassin, S., & Kiechel, K.(1996). The social psychology of false confessions: Compliance, internalization, and confabulation. Psychological Science, 7, 125-128)
  15. Kassin, S., Drizin, S., Grisso, T., Gudjonsson, G., Leo, R., & Redlich, A. (2010). Police-induced confessions: Risk factors and recommendations. Law and Human Behavior, 34, 3-38.
  16. Kassin, S., Redlich, A., Alceste, F., & Luke, T. (2018). On the general acceptance of confessions research: Opinions of the scientific community. American Psychologist, 73, 63-80.
  17. Kassin, S. & Wrightsman, L. (1980). Prior confessions and mock juror verdicts. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 10, 133 146.
  18. Kassin, S. & McNall, K. (1991). Police interrogations and confessions: Communicating promises and threats by pragmatic implication. Law and Human Behavior, 15, 233 251.
  19. Kassin, S., Goldstein, C., & Savitsky, K. (2003). Behavioral confirmation in the interrogation room: On the dangers of presuming guilt. Law and Human Behavior, 27, 187-203.
  20. Kassin, S. (2005). On the psychology of confessions: Does innocence put innocents at risk? American Psychologist, 60, 215-228.
  21. Kassin, S., Dror, I., & Kukucka, J. (2013). The forensic confirmation bias: Problems, perspectives, and proposed solutions. Journal of Applied Research in Memory & Cognition, 2, 42-52.
  22. Kassin, S. (2012). Why confessions trump innocence. American Psychologist, 67, 431-445.
  23. Kassin, S. (2017). False confessions: How can psychology so basic be so counterintuitive? American Psychologist, 72, 951-964.
  24. Kassin, S., Kukucka, J., Lawson, V., & DeCarlo, J. (2014). Does video recording alter the behavior of police during interrogation?: Mock crime-and-investigation study. Law and Human Behavior, 38, 73-83.
  25. Kassin, S., Kukucka, J., Lawson, V., & DeCarlo, J. (2017). Police reports of mock suspect interrogations: A test of accuracy and perception. Law and Human Behavior, 41, 230–243.
  26. Kassin, S., Russano, M., Amrom, A., Hellgren, J., Kukucka, J., & Lawson, V. (2019). Does video recording inhibit crime suspects?: Evidence from a fully randomized field experiment. Law and Human Behavior, 43, 44-55.
  27. Starr, D.(2019). The Confession. Science, 364, 1022-1026.
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