Biography

Saul Kassin received his B.S. at Brooklyn College and his Ph.D. at the University of Connecticut. He later served as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Kansas; taught at Purdue University; served as a U.S. Supreme Court Judicial Fellow, working at the Federal Judicial Center; and was a postdoctoral research fellow and visiting professor at Stanford University.

Kassin is an author of several textbooks, including Social Psychology 12e (2024; coauthors Steven Fein and Hazel Markus). He has also authored or edited various scholarly books, including: Duped: Why Innocent People Confess–and Why We Believe Their Confessions (Prometheus Books, 2022) and Pillars of Social Psychology (Cambridge University Press, 2022). In his research, Kassin initiated the scientific study of false confessions in the 1980’s by introducing a taxonomy that distinguishes between three types of false confessions (voluntary, compliant, and internalized) and devising laboratory paradigms to test why innocent people are targeted for interrogation and why they confess. Interested in the downstream consequences of confession, he has also studied “forensic confirmation biases” and the impact of confessions on judges, juries, lay witnesses, forensic science examiners, the plea bargaining process, and public stigma–even after exoneration. Focused on policy reform, his research on video recording interrogations was funded by the National Science foundation.

Kassin is past president of Division 41 of APA (aka the American Psychology-Law Society, or AP-LS). Over the years, he has received distinguished lifetime achievement awards from AP-LS as well as the American Psychological Association (APA), the Association for Psychological Science (APS), and the European Association of Psychology and Law (EAPL). He is the lead author on the Official APA White Paper on false confessions (Kassin et al., 2010) and has appeared as an analyst on major news networks, syndicated TV shows, documentary films, and podcasts. His work was featured in Science Magazine (Starr, 2019). He has also consulted in a number of high-profile cases and published newspaper articles aimed at raising public awareness.

For a more in-depth biography, see APA Award for Distinguished Contribution to Research in Public Policy.