Saul Kassin - Confessions in the Court Room

Saul Kassin is a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York and Massachusetts Professor Emeritus at Williams College, in Williamstown, MA.

He received 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.

Dr. Kassin is author of Psychology (Prentice Hall, 4th edition) and Psychology in Modules (Pearson Custom Publishing). Along with Steven Fein and Hazel Markus, he is also lead author of Social Psychology (11th edition), published by Cengage Learning. He has published numerous research articles and book chapters and has co-authored or edited various scholarly books, including: Confessions in the Courtroom, The Psychology of Evidence and Trial Procedure, The American Jury on Trial: Psychological Perspectives, and Developmental Social Psychology.

In the 1980's, Kassin pioneered the scientific study of false confessions by introducing a taxonomy that distinguished between three types of false confessions (voluntary, compliant, and internalized) that is universally accepted today and by devising laboratory paradigms to test why innocent people are targeted for interrogation and why they confess. Also interested in the consequences of confession, Kassin has also studied "forensic confirmation biases" and the impact that confessions have on judges, juries, lay witnesses, forensic science examiners, and the plea bargaining process. Interested in matters of policy and reform, his recent research on the video recording of interrogations was funded by the National Science foundation.

Dr. Kassin is past president of Division 41 of APA (aka the American Psychology-Law Society, or AP-LS). He has received a Presidential Citation Award from APA for his work on false confessions (2007), the International Investigative Interviewing Research Group (iiiRG) Lifetime Achievement Award (2011), the AP-LS Award for Distinguished Contribution (2014), the American Psychological Association (APA) Award for Distinguished Contribution to Research in Public Policy (2017), the European Association of Psychology and Law (EAPL) Award for Distinguished Lifetime Contribution (2017), and the Association for Psychological Science (APS) James McKeen Cattell Lifetime Achievement Award for Applied Research (2021).

Kassin is the lead author on the Official APA White Paper on false confessions. His work is cited all over the world–including by the Supreme Courts of the U.S., Canada, and Israel. He has appeared as an analyst on CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, and various syndicated news shows, and in several documentaries--most notably, Ken Burns' 2012 film, The Central Park Five. He has also consulted in numerous high-profile cases.