Interrogations-and-Confessions-Handbook

152 A Psychology of Interrogations and Confessions
Some confess readily and without much external pressure, whereas others take
a long time to confess or only confess when the evidence against them is overwhelming,
if at all. In three separate studies about 70% of suspects claimed
that they would definitely not have confessed to the police if they had not been
suspected of the crime by the police (Gudjonsson & Bownes, 1992; Gudjonsson &
Petursson, 1991; Sigurdsson & Gudjonsson, 1994). About a further 20% said
they would have confessed even if the police had not suspected them of the offence,
and an additional 10% remained uncertain about what they would have
done. The consistency of the figures across two different countries—Iceland and
Northern Ireland—is striking. Why should 20% of suspects be motivated to confess
to crimes of which they were not suspected by the police? Guilty conscience
perhaps? These figures seem counter-intuitive in view of the potentially serious
consequences for the person involved. Indeed, Inbau, Reid and Buckley (1986)
certainly view it as ‘. . . impractical to expect any but very few confessions to
result from a guilty conscience unprovoked by an interrogation’ (p. xvi). Nevertheless,
I have come across a number of murder cases where people had the need
to talk about what they done, which resulted in their volunteering a confession
to a spouse, a friend or the police. Of course, there may be cultural differences
in this respect.
With my psychiatrist colleague Hannes Petursson (Gudjonsson & Petursson,
1991), I investigated the reasons for confessing among 74 Icelandic prisoners.
We looked at a number of factors that could be associated with the reasons for
the confession, such as the type of offence committed, the offenders’ intelligence,
attitudes, personality and the way they attributed blame for the crime they
had committed. This study was replicated in Northern Ireland (Gudjonsson &
Bownes, 1992) and on a large Icelandic prison population with an extended
confession questionnaire (Gudjonsson & Sigurdsson, 1999; Sigurdsson & Gudjonsson,
1994). A copy of the revised Gudjonsson Confession Questionnaire
(Gudjonsson & Sigurdsson, 1999; GCQ-R) is given in Appendix 1.
In all the studies we hypothesized, on the basis of the Gudjonsson Cognitive–
Behavioural Model of Confession, that confessions would be predominantly
caused by three types of facilitative factor. These are the following.
1. External pressure to confess, which is associated with persuasive police
interrogation techniques, police behaviour and fear of confinement.
2. Internal pressure to confess, where suspects experience a great deal of guilt
about the crime they committed and consequently need to relieve themselves
of the guilt by confessing.
3. Perception of proof, where suspects believe that there is no point in denying
the offence because the police will eventually prove they did it.
We administered a specially designed ‘Confession Questionnaire’ to 74 Icelandic
prisoners who had been convicted of various offences, which included violent,
property and sexual offences. Factor analysis of the Confession Questionnaire
revealed the three facilitative factors listed above and one additional inhibitory
factor (i.e. fear of the consequences), which were replicated in our research of 80
prisoners serving sentences for violence, sex or property offences in Northern
Ireland. Six items loaded on a factor labelled external pressure. The contents of