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.