Saul Kassin

Saul Kassin is an American academic, who serves as a Distinguished Professor 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.

Biography and education

Kassin was born in 1953 in New York. He attended Brooklyn College from 1971 to 1974 and graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree. While there, he helped run experiments on implicit learning for cognitive psychologist Arthur S. Reber. From 1974 to 1978, he attended the University of Connecticut in Storrs, Connecticut, where he received his Ph.D. in personality and social psychology. From there, he began his psychology and law career by studying jury decision making with Lawrence S. Wrightsman at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas. After two years at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, he started at Williams College in 1981, where he spent most of his career. In 1984–85, while on sabbatical from Williams, Kassin was awarded a U.S. Supreme Court Judicial Fellowship and worked at the Federal Judicial Center in Washington, DC. In 1985–86, worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University.

Career books, awards, research, and advocacy

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 also co-author of the textbook ''Social Psychology'' with Steven Fein and Hazel Rose Markus, now in its twelfth edition and editor of ''Pillars of Social Psychology'' (2022), a book of memoirs contributed by legendary social psychologists.

In the 1980s, Kassin pioneered the scientific study of false confessions. For that work, he 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. In 2021, he received the James McKeen Cattell Lifetime Achievement Award for Applied Research from the Association for Psychological Science (APS).

Kassin was the president of Division 41 of APA, a.k.a. AP-LS. He continues to teach, research, write, and lecture to various groups in the area of social psychology and the law. He has appeared as a guest analyst on several major TV networks and syndicated news shows and in a number of podcasts - including Shankar Vedantam's ''Hidden Brain'', Dax Shepard's ''Armchair Expert'', and Erin Moriarty's ''My Life of Crime'' - and documentaries such as the 2012 film by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon titled '' The Central Park Five''. To raise public awareness, Kassin has also written several newspaper editorials and an article on the false confessions that surrounded the infamous 1964 killing of Kitty Genovese.

Kassin is a staunch critic of deceptive interrogation tactics that can cause innocent people to confess. In light of research showing that Miranda does not protect the innocent, he is also a vocal advocate for the requirement that all interrogations be videotaped in their entirety—without exception. Kassin is best known for pioneering the scientific study of false confessions. In 1985, he and Lawrence Wrightsman introduced a taxonomy that distinguished three types of false confessions—voluntary, compliant, and internalized. This classification scheme is used all over the world.

Kassin created the first laboratory research methods (the most notable being the computer crash experiment) used in forensic psychology to study the problems with certain types of police interrogation techniques and why innocent people confess. Along with fellow experts Steven Drizin, Thomas Grisso, Gisli Gudjonsson, Richard Leo, and Allison Redlich, he wrote a 2010 AP-LS Scientific Review Paper called "Police-Induced Confessions: Risk Factors and Recommendations." Along with fellow experts Hayley Cleary, Gisli Gudjonsson, Richard Leo, Christian Meissner, Allison Redlich, and Kyle Scherr, this Review Paper (SRP 2.0) was revised in 2025.

Over the years, Kassin has published many other empirical articles on the subject of confessions and has introduced such terms as positive coercion bias, minimization and maximization, guilt-presumptive interrogation, the phenomenology of innocence, and the forensic confirmation bias In recent articles, he explains why judges, juries, and others tend to believe false confessions even when contradicted eyewitnesses, alibis, DNA, and other evidence. In 2018, he and his colleagues published a survey of confession experts worldwide that indicated the consensus of opinions within the scientific community.

Kassin has long advocated for the mandatory video recording of suspect interviews and interrogations from start to finish. With funding support from the National Science Foundation, he and his 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 work is cited all over the world. He has worked on many high-profile cases and with the Innocence Project to use psychology 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.

In June 2022, Kassin published a book titled ''DUPED: Why Innocent People Confess - And Why We Believe Their Confessions.'' Combining real cases and psychological research, this book describes how this unimaginable aspect of human behavior happens and then how false confessions corrupt forensics and other evidence, forces guilty pleas, blinds judges and juries, and stigmatizes defendants their entire lives—even after they are exonerated.

References

External links

* Op-ed articl

* Op-ed articl


Kassin biography

Professional Profile Kassin

Op-ed article

Kassin's White Paper on false confessions

Review on the psychology of confessions

Social psychological analysis of false confessions

Historical exploration into the 1964 killing of Kitty Genovese: What ELSE does this case tell us?

CBS News: Do you know your MIRANDA rights?

Interview of Kassin at the Vera Institute of Justice

National Science Foundation Video (2016) - What Can We Do About False Confessions?

Oprah Winfrey show on coerced confessions

{{DEFAULTSORT:Kassin, Saul
1953 births
Living people
21st-century American psychologists
Brooklyn College alumni
John Jay College of Criminal Justice faculty
University of Connecticut alumni
Fellows of the American Psychological Association
20th-century American psychologists
James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award recipients