One of the domains within which adolescents’ perceptions, behaviors and tendencies may make them especially vulnerable is the legal arena, especially the interrogation room. When teens are suspected of committing crimes, they, like their adult counterparts, may be subjected to lengthy interrogations that include pressure, reinforcements, repetitive requests for information, fear inducement, befriending and a host of other direct and indirect methods of eliciting a confession. There are no laws protecting juveniles from interrogation tactics that are legal with adults, and studies indeed suggest that police tend to use the same types of questioning strategies with youths and adults alike (Redlich, Silverman, Chen, & Steiner, 2004).
These interrogation tactics, though effective at eliciting confessions, are also known to induce false confessions, with children and adolescents being especially vulnerable. Indeed, several examples of egregious cases of false confessions have appeared in the news: 14-year-old Michael Crowe confessed to the murder of his twelve-year-old sister, Stephanie (it was later determined that transient in the neighborhood committed the crime); 11-year-old Lacresha Murray confessed to beating a toddler to death and was convicted of murder (she was later exonerated because evidence indicated the injuries occurred before Lacresha was with the toddler). Empirical evidence confirms the anecdotal cases. In an evaluation of 328 exoneration cases, 44 percent of juveniles falsely confessed, compared to 13 percent of adults. Among the youngest cases, involving 12- to 15-year-olds, 75 percent falsely confessed (Gross, Jacoby, Matheson, Montgomery, & Patil, 2005). In laboratory experiments with mock crimes (Redlich & Goodman, 2003), self-report studies of confession behavior (Gudjonsson, Sigurdsson, Sigfusdottir, & Young, 2012), and hypothetical vignettes (Goldstein, Condie, Kalbeitzer, Osman, & Geier, 2003), adolescents are consistently more likely to falsely confess than adults.
Given adolescents’ greater vulnerability to false confessions, it is imperative, from a policy perspective, to determine why. Such insight is critical to identifying how best to eliminate the interrogation tactics that are especially likely to lead to dramatic errors in youths’ responses.
Adolescents Waiving their Miranda Rights
One of the safest strategies for innocent suspects (including youths) to avoid a false confession is to invoke their Miranda rights and remain silent when arrested. Yet, adolescents are more likely than adults to waive their Miranda rights. This is due to adolescents’ greater misunderstanding some aspects of the Miranda warning (e.g., Viljoen, Klaver, & Roesch, 2005), adolescents’ not fully comprehending how to invoke their rights (Oberlander & Goldstein, 2001) and adolescents’ increased likelihood of compliance or susceptibility to coercion (Carver & Scheier, 1981). Adolescents are more likely to base their decisions on immediate, rather than longer range consequences (Grisso et al., 2003) and young adolescents are less likely than older adolescents to consider the seriousness of the charges or the amount of evidence against them when making Miranda waiver decisions (Abramovitch, Peterson-Badali, & Rohan, 1995).
Adolescents and the Illusion of Transparency
An interesting, relatively recent explanation for at least some of adolescents’ increased risk for waiving their Miranda rights and for false confessions is their vulnerability to the ”illusion of transparency.” This refers to a tendency to overestimate the extent to which others can accurately determine their internal states (Gilovich & Savitsky, 1999). In a potential deception/truth-telling context, this illusion is the combination of internal feelings of transparency with the inability of others to determine one’s veracity. Feelings of transparency refer to feelings that one’s internal states are easily apparent to others. In addition, self-presentation behaviors begin to appear around the age of 8 years (Banerjee, 2002) and increase markedly during early to middle adolescent years, concurrent with growing self-consciousness (Elkind & Bowen, 1979). Thus, adolescents experience heightened awareness of their own emotions and attentiveness to how they are perceived by others. These feelings may lead them to believe, more so than at other ages, that their internal states are being scrutinized and can be understood by others, despite the fact that others are quite limited in their ability to discern individuals’ true feelings, and, of relevance to the present report, the veracity of their statements.
With regard to the illusion of transparency and suspects’ willingness in general to waive Miranda rights, Kassin and Norwick (2004) found that guilty (36 percent) adult experimental suspects were substantially less likely than innocent adults (81 percent) to waive their Miranda rights. In fact, over 72 percent of innocent suspects who waived their right to silence provided an explanation consistent with an illusion of transparency (e.g., “I didn’t have anything to hide”). Thus, innocent adults may be more willing to waive their rights and talk to police, believing their truthfulness will be evident. Our new work suggests that these tendencies are exaggerated in youth, possibly uniquely in adolescence. Like in adults, the illusion was stronger when youths told the truth than when they lied. Also, older participants (i.e., 11-17 years) predicted that their truths would be more transparent than their lies, while younger participants (i.e., 8-10 years) predicted approximately the same degree of transparency for truth and lies. Such developmental trends are consistent with adolescents’ greater concern with self-presentation and heightened self-consciousness, which likely directs their attention to their own behavior and statements.
Recommendations and Conclusions
To help adolescents avoid the dangers associated with an illusion of transparency, they should be made aware of the phenomenon. Research on speech anxiety (Savitsky & Gilovich, 2003) suggests that knowing about the illusion can reduce individuals’ over-predictions of their own transparency when truthful. One could imagine that telling innocent suspects that their veracity is not apparent to others, and that observers are not skilled at detecting veracity, might reduce the number of innocent people naively waiving their right to silence. Perhaps this should be part of the Miranda warning itself, although whether it would work with youth suspects is not clear. Even with such an instruction, however, additional risks that contribute to false confessions (e.g., misunderstanding of the Miranda warning) still exist, especially among youths. More research on the impact of these factors in combination, among vulnerable youths, is required to better inform interventions that might protect adolescents from themselves.
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