Saul Kassin

Prof. Saul Kassin

Trained in basic social and cognitive psychology, my research focuses on applications to various aspects of the law and criminal justice. Over the years, my work has addressed a range of interrelated topics, including: Police interviewing and interrogations; human judgments of truth and deception; tactics that elicit true and false confessions; the phenomenology of innocence; actor and observer perceptions of custody; jury decision-making; the effects of video recording of interrogations on the behavior of police, suspects, and juries; how confessions corrupt witnesses, alibis, and other evidence; forensic confirmation biases in crime labs, and confession effects on guilty pleas and stigma-even after exoneration.

Located in the Psychology Department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, in New York, my students and I conduct laboratory and in-field experiments; online surveys of police, forensic experts, confession experts, lay adults, and adolescents; and aggregated case studies.

Ultimately, this research is aimed at improving policy, practice, and the administration of criminal justice; identifying and preventing wrongful convictions; and raising public awareness.