Interrogations-and-Confessions-Handbook

374 A Psychology of Interrogations and Confessions
variance in compliance and when combined accounted for 25% of the variance.
This means that Denial Coping is related to compliance independently of selfesteem.
This is important, because low self-esteem is significantly correlated
with both compliance and dysfunctional coping.
Smith and Gudjonsson (1995a) failed to find a significant correlation between
the GCS and the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale. The authors, in view of
some of the reservations about the Rosenberg Scale raised by Wylie (1989),
questioned the validity of the Self-Esteem Scale with a forensic inpatient population,
where the patients’ responses may have represented their ideal rather
than actual self-esteem.
In a more naturalistic setting, the GCS has been shown to discriminate significantly
between ‘false confessors’ and those suspects who are able to resist police
pressure to confess (Gudjonsson, 1984b, 1991b; Sigurdsson & Gudjonsson,
1996). I looked at the normative GCS scores of different groups of subjects and
hypothesized that alleged false confessors should score higher than, for example,
those criminal suspects or defendants who had been able to resist confessing
whilst being interrogated by the police. The results from the study clearly indicated
that this was the case. This type of validation will be mentioned later
in this chapter in relation to more recent studies of the GCS.
Birgisson (1996) used this classification when he studied the differences in
the personality of convicted American sex offenders who admitted their offence
and those who had denied it. The 70 ‘admitters’ and 30 ‘deniers’ completed
the GCS and the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ; Eysenck &
Eysenck, 1975). The mean GCS scores were 10.0 and 7.9 for the admitters and
deniers, respectively. This difference was highly significant ( p < 0.01, one-tailed
test). The admitters also had significantly higher Neuroticism score on the EPQ
than the deniers ( p < 0.05, one-tailed test) and a lower Lie score ( p < 0.05, onetailed
test). The GCS score among the admitters correlated significantly with
EPQ Psychoticism (r = 30, p < 0.01, one-tailed test) and Neuroticism (r = 42,
p < 0.001, one-tailed test). None of the correlations were significant among the
deniers. One possible reason for this is the high Lie, or social desirability
score, among the deniers, which may have artificially lowered the Psychoticism
and Neuroticism scores. Birgisson argues that the difference between the
groups in the Lie score may reflect the greater defensiveness among the deniers.
This is perhaps not surprising when considering the fact that the participants
were all attending an outpatient clinic for court-ordered psychotherapy where
denial concerning their offences would inevitably be challenged during therapy.
Therefore, the defensiveness among the deniers may reflect the context
in which they were tested. However, sex offenders, as a group, tend to have
higher social desirability scores than violent offenders, which may reflect their
level of defensiveness during psychological testing (Gudjonsson & Sigurdsson,
2000).
As discussed earlier in this chapter, one of the reasons for developing the
GCS was to identify individuals who are susceptible to pressure from others to
commit offences (i.e. they can be coerced into committing a crime). Gudjonsson
and Sigurdsson (submitted) investigated this aspect of compliance among 305
university students and 320 secondary school students with regard to selfreport
offending. A 22-item Motivation Scale for offending was developed and