Saul Kassin is an American academic. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the City University of New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Massachusetts Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
Education and Career
Saul M. Kassin was born in April 1953 in Brooklyn, New York. He later attended Far Rockaway High School in Queens between the years 1967 and 1971, where he believed that he would go on to study journalism. From 1971 to 1974, Kassin was enrolled in Brooklyn College, graduating with his Bachelor of Science degree. While there, he assisted cognitive psychologist Arthur S. Reber with running experiments on implicit learning. From 1974 to 1978, he attended the University of Connecticut in Storrs, Connecticut, where he received his Ph.D. in personality and social psychology and studied attribution theory with Charles A. Lowe. In 1978-1979, he worked as a postdoctoral research fellow to study jury decision-making with Lawrence S. Wrightsman at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas.
Kassin taught at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana for two years before moving in 1981 to Williams College, where he spent the bulk of his academic career. On a year-long sabbatical from Williams, Kassin was awarded a U.S. Supreme Court Judicial Fellowship in 1984-1985, during which time he worked at the Federal Judicial Center in Washington, DC. Then in 1985-1986, he spent the year on a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University in Stanford, California. In 2006, Kassin accepted a Distinguished Professorship at John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York. He retired in January 2026 and is now a Professor Emeritus both at Williams and at John Jay College.
Research
In the 1980s, Kassin pioneered the scientific study of false confessions--why they happen and the cascading consequences that follow. At the time, the pages of history had provided many examples, beginning with the Salem witch trials of 1692.Schiff, S. (2015). Witches: Suspicion, betrayal, and hysteria in 1692 Salem. Little, Brown. Then in 1819, two men in Vermont were interrogated into confessing to a murder. While they were in prison, the alleged victim was found alive.Warden, R. (2005). First wrongful conviction: Jesse and Stephen Boorn. Northwestern Center for Wrongful Convictions https://www.law.northwestern.edu/legalclinic/wrongfulconvictions/exonerations/vt/boorn-brothers.htmlOver the years, case studies of wrongful convictions also consistently demonstrated the problem.e.g., Borchard, E. (1932). Convicting the innocent: Sixty-five actual errors of criminal justice. Yale University Press. Also see Bedau, H., & Radelet, M. (1987). Miscarriages of justice in potentially capital cases. Stanford Law Review, 40, 21–179. https://doi.org/10.2307/1228828 Then in 1985, Kassin and Lawrence Wrightsman introduced a taxonomy that distinguished three types of false confessions—voluntary, compliant, and internalized.Kassin, S. & Wrightsman, L. (1985). Confession evidence. In Kassin & Wrightsman (Eds.), The psychology of evidence and trial procedure. Beverly Hills: Sage. This classification scheme is still widely accepted and used all over the world.For other overviews of this field, particularly focused on individual and clinical vulnerabilities, see Gudjonsson, G. (2003). The Psychology of Interrogations and Confessions: A Handbook. Chichester, England: John Wiley.Also see Gudjonsson, G. (2018). The Psychology of False Confessions: Forty years of Science and Practice. Chichester, England: John Wiley.
Concerned that certain commonly used deceptive interrogation tactics increase the risk that innocent people would confess, Kassin and his students and colleagues went on to innovate laboratory methods for studying these processes in controlled experiments. In one early study, for example, Kassin and Kiechel created the now-famous computer crash experiment in which they used the false evidence ploy to induce innocent college students to confess that they had tampered with a computer, causing it to crash. Some of the students even internalized the belief they had crashed the computer and confabulated false memories to correspond with that belief.Kassin, S., & Kiechel, K. (1996). The social psychology of false confessions: Compliance, internalization, and confabulation. Psychological Science, 7, 125-128. https://saulkassin.org/wp-content/uploads/ABC%20%282006%29%20Inside%20the%20Box.mp4. A few years later, Russano and others introduced the “cheating paradigm” in which some participants but not others were induced into an act that violated the terms of the experiment. The researchers were then able to assess the extent to which various interrogation tactics elicited true vs. false (i.e., "diagnostic") confessions. Russano, M., Meissner, C., Narchet, F., & Kassin, S. (2005). Investigating true and false confessions within a novel experimental paradigm. Psychological Science, 16, 481–486. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0956-7976.2005.01560.x
Numerous other empirical articles were then published on the subject of confessions that have introduced such terms as positive coercion bias,Kassin, S. & Wrightsman, L. (1980). Prior confessions and mock juror verdicts. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 10, 133 146. minimization and maximization,Kassin, S. & McNall, K. (1991). Police interrogations and confessions: Communicating promises and threats by pragmatic implication. Law and Human Behavior, 15, 233 251. guilt-presumptive interrogation,Kassin, S., Goldstein, C., & Savitsky, K. (2003). Behavioral confirmation in the interrogation room: On the dangers of presuming guilt. Law and Human Behavior, 27, 187-203. the phenomenology of innocence,Kassin, S. (2005). On the psychology of confessions: Does innocence put innocents at risk? American Psychologist, 60, 215-228.Perillo, J. & Kassin, S. (2011). Inside interrogation: The lie, the bluff, and false confessions. Law and Human Behavior, 35, 327-337.Guyll, M., Madon, S., Yang, Y., Lannin, D.., Scherr, K., & Greathouse, S. (2013). Innocence and resisting confession during interrogation: Effects on physiologic activity. Law and Human Behavior, 37, 366–375. https://doi.org/10.1037/lhb0000044 and the forensic confirmation bias.Kassin, S., Dror, I., & Kukucka, J. (2013). The forensic confirmation bias: Problems, perspectives, and proposed solutions. Journal of Applied Research in Memory & Cognition, 2, 42-52. Research has shown that observers (including experienced investigators) cannot distinguish between true and false confessions.--and that judges, juries, and others are quick to believe false confessions even when they are coerced and recanted, and even when contradicted eyewitnesses, alibis, DNA, and other evidence.Kassin, S. (2012). Why confessions trump innocence. American Psychologist, 67, 431-445.Kassin, S. (2017). False confessions: How can psychology so basic be so counterintuitive? American Psychologist, 72, 951-964.Appleby, S. & Kassin, S. (2016). When self-report trumps science: Effects of confessions, DNA, and prosecutorial theories on perceptions of guilt. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 22, 127-140.. It is important to note that not everyone in the law enforcement community agrees with these criticisms.e.g., Inbau, F., Reid, J., Buckley, J., & Jayne, B. (2013). Criminal Interrogation and Confessions (5th ed.). Jones & Bartlett.. But a 2018 survey of confession experts worldwide indicated a high consensus of opinions on these issues within the scientific community.Kassin, S., Redlich, A., Alceste, F., & Luke, T. (2018). On the general acceptance of confessions research: Opinions of the scientific community. American Psychologist, 73, 63-80.
Taken together, research findings indicate clearly that investigators should be required to record their interrogations with suspects, from start to finish and without exception. With funding support from the National Science Foundation, he and several colleagues conducted a series of experiments on the effects of video recording on police, suspects, and lay fact finders--including the first fully randomized field experiment involving actual suspects. The results have all been published.Kassin, S., Kukucka, J., Lawson, V., & DeCarlo, J. (2014). Does video recording alter the behavior of police during interrogation?: Mock crime-and-investigation study. Law and Human Behavior, 38, 73-83.Kassin, S., Kukucka, J., Lawson, V., & DeCarlo, J. (2017). Police reports of mock suspect interrogations: A test of accuracy and perception. Law and Human Behavior, 41, 230–243.Kassin, S., Russano, M., Amrom, A., Hellgren, J., Kukucka, J., & Lawson, V. (2019). Does video recording inhibit crime suspects?: Evidence from a fully randomized field experiment. Law and Human Behavior, 43, 44-55.Some thirty states, the District of Columbia, and federal law enforcement agencies now have a recording requirement in place.
Books Over the years, Kassin has authored and edited several books, including: The Psychology of Evidence and Trial Procedure, The American Jury on Trial: Psychological Perspectives, and Confessions in the Courtroom (all with Lawrence S. Wrightsman). He is lead author of the textbook Social Psychology with Steven Fein and Hazel Rose Markus., now in its twelfth edition.Kassin, S., Fein, S., & Markus, H. (2024). Social psychology (12th edition). Sage Publications He also recently edited Pillars of Social Psychology, a collection of memoirs contributed by legendary social psychologists from the 1950s to the present day.
In 2022, Kassin authored DUPED: Why Innocent People Confess - And Why We Believe Their Confessions. Combining high- and low-profile real world cases and psychological research, this book describes how this unimaginable aspect of human behavior can happen--and then how false confessions corrupt forensics and other evidence, often stigmatizing innocents for life. In 2026, he edited CHAMPIONS OF INNOCENCE: Inside the Fight Against Wrongful Convictions. Introduced by John Grisham, this collection of essays is written by founders of the innocence movement, scientists, legal scholars, exoneree-advocates, and journalists in the media.
Awards and Public Appearances Kassin's psychology and law research and writing has been cited all over the world. He has worked on many high-profile cases and with the Innocence Project to help prevent and correct wrongful convictions. He has testified as an expert witness in state, federal, and military courts and was the subject of a feature article published in SCIENCE.Starr, D.(2019). The Confession. Science, 364, 1022-1026. Kassin has won lifetime contribution awards from the International Investigative Interviewing Research Group (iiiRG), the American Psychology-Law Society (AP-LS), and the European Association of Psychology and the Law (EAPL). In 2017, he received the American Psychological Association (APA) Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest. Award for Distinguished Contributions to Research in Public Policy: Saul M. Kassin (2017). Citation and Biography. American Psychologist, 72, 948-950. In 2021, he received the James McKeen Cattell Lifetime Achievement Award for Applied Research from the Association for Psychological Science (APS).