Suspect personality, police interrogations, and false confessions: Maybe it is not just the situation

We empirically examined whether individual personality differences exist between people who falsely confess and internalize responsibility for an incident and those who do not. After completing personality inventories assessing authoritarianism, locus of control, interaction anxiousness, and fear of negative evaluation, as well as the Gudjonsson Suggestibility Scale (GSS 2), participants completed the Kassin and Kiechel (1996) computer paradigm for eliciting false confessions. Overall, 81.6% of the 98 participants confessed to and 59.2% internalized responsibility for the incident. Although none of the personality variables related to participant false confessions, locus of control, interaction anxiousness and authoritarianism all differed as a function of internalization. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.