A confession is often seen as the gold standard of evidence in a criminal case, leading to guilty verdicts even when there is no other evidence, even when there’s a reason to think the confession was involuntary, and when other evidence like DNA contradicts the story in the confession. Throughout the last four or five decades, scientists have learned a lot about the psychology of interrogations and confessions. But has that information trickled down to the public?

This multi-part series—“What Psychologists Want You to Know About Interrogations”—uses data from a 2021 survey of the general public and their knowledge about police interrogations and false confessions. (This post is part 3.) This survey compared the public’s knowledge to that of experts in the field: psychologists who have published empirical papers in peer-reviewed journals on these topics. The results showed that these two groups agree on certain information about interrogations and confessions. But a lot of the time, the public has ideas about these topics that go against what experts know from their research. This series presents a few key findings that experts want you to know.

Interrogation rooms used to be a place of overt coercion and sometimes physical violence (see Kassin et al., 2025 for a brief history of the third degree). Starting in 1966 in a seminal decision called

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