You’ve now learned about two experimental “paradigms” for studying interrogations and confessions in a lab setting: the computer-crash paradigm (Kassin & Kiechel, 1996) and the cheating paradigm (Russano et al., 2005). Kassin and Kiechel examined the effects of false evidence on innocent suspects’ confession rates, whereas Russano and colleagues (2005) examined the effects of minimization on both true and false confession rates.

Come up with a research question that you could test using one of these experimental paradigms. What would you want to examine empirically and how would you do it? How would this research question contribute to scientific understanding of interrogations and confessions?