Conclusions

Until the 1980s little was known about the psychology of false confessions, including how they were elicited, the mechanism and processes involved, and how they could be identified. This is well illustrated by Barrie Irving’s comment in 1980 that ‘At present it is not even possible to be certain about how a confession which is known to be false came to be made’ (Irving & Hilgendorf, 1980, pp. 25–26). At the time, there was general reluctance to accept that suspects would confess falsely to serious crimes that they had not committed, unless they suffered from a mental disorder, such as mental illness or intellectual disability. Dr James MacKeith and I became aware of this scepticism among some colleagues when we presented a paper on false confessions at The Stockholm Symposium on Witness Psychology in September 1981 and introduced the concept of ‘memory distrust syndrome’. Memory distrust syndrome occurs when people develop