Evaluating videotaped confessions: expertise provides no defense against the camera-perspective effect.

False confessions extracted during police interrogations have been linked to the wrongful conviction of innocent people (Drizin & Leo, 2004; Dwyer, Neufeld, & Scheck, 2000). Many scientific, legal, and political leaders have called for mandatory videotaping of custodial interrogations as one solution to this troubling problem (e.g., Drizin & Reich, 2004). However, the well-documented phenomenon of illusory causation—the tendency for people to attribute unwarranted causality to a stimulus simply because it is more conspicuous than others—suggests that evaluations of videotaped confessions could be altered by presumably inconsequential changes in the camera perspective used at initial recording (McArthur, 1980; Taylor & Fiske, 1978). Indeed, a growing body of research demonstrates that simulated videotaped confessions recorded with the camera focused on the suspect—compared with videotapes from other camera points of view (e.g., focused equally on the suspect and interrogator)—lead jury-eligible individuals to assess that the confessions are more voluntary and that the suspects are more likely to be guilty (Lassiter, 2002; Lassiter, Geers, Munhall, Handley, & Beers, 2001). Actual criminal interrogations are usually videotaped with the camera focused on the suspect (Kassin, 1997), so the implications of these findings are alarming. The U.S. Supreme Court has established that criminal defendants are entitled to a pretrial determination of whether any confession they gave was voluntary, and that a confession is properly introduced at trial only if a judge has ruled that it was given voluntarily (Jackson v. Denno, 1964). Thus, judges play a critical role in determining what confession evidence juries are actually allowed to consider. It is important to assess, therefore, whether the decisions of judges are similarly influenced by camera perspective. It is possible that their greater knowledge, experience, and understanding of the law pertaining to confessions could immunize them against such an effect. Guthrie, Rachlinski, and Wistrich (2002) investigated judges’ susceptibility to various cognitive illusions (e.g., the hindsight bias) and found that although judges were as susceptible to some illusions as laypersons, their relative performance with regard to other illusions was noticeably better. More recently, it has been shown that judges’ perceptions of a witness’s credibility—in contrast to those of laypersons—are unaffected by the witness’s potentially misleading emotional expression (Wessel, Drevland, Eilertsen, & Magnussen, 2006). Findings such as these raise the possibility that judicial experience and expertise help judges avoid the influence of camera perspective. Police interrogators are criminal-justice professionals with different, but nonetheless relevant, expertise. When conducting interrogations, veteran law-enforcement officers should be particularly vigilant about voluntariness, both because a confession that is not voluntary may indicate that the suspect is not guilty and because a confession that a court concludes is not voluntary will be inadmissible. Of course, unlike judges, police interrogators have no charge to determine the voluntariness of a confession before jurors see it. Nevertheless, their training and experience may also lead them to be less affected by camera perspective than laypersons are. Consistent with this possibility, recent research found that some highly experienced police officers viewing videotaped interrogations achieved higher accuracy rates with regard to detecting suspects’ lies than is typically found for nonprofessionals (Mann, Vrij, & Bull, 2004). To examine whether pertinent expertise can mitigate the camera-perspective effect, we enlisted 21 judges who had previously served as both prosecutors and criminal defense Address correspondence to G. Daniel Lassiter, Department of Psychology, Ohio University, Athens, OH 45701, e-mail: lassiter@ohio. edu. PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE