Category: Psychology

This is an interesting, and very detailed article on the techniques used these days by police to get confessions out of suspects. I believe the author is mostly referring to interrogations in the US, but in any case, it is rather interesting.

In looking for a replacement for illegal forms of coercion, police turned to fairly basic psychological techniques like the time-honored “good cop bad cop” routine, in which one detective browbeats the suspect and the other pretends to be looking out for him. People tend to trust and talk to someone they perceive as their protector. Another basic technique is maximization, in which the police try to scare the suspect into talking by telling him all of the horrible things he’ll face if he’s convicted of the crime in a court of law. Fear tends to make people talk. For a while, police tried such things as polygraphs to determine if the suspect was being deceptive, but polygraphs and polygraph training are expensive, and the results are almost never admissible in court. But some polygraph analysts, including a man named John Reid, began noticing that subjects exhibited certain outward, consistent physical signs that coincided with the polygraph’s determination of untruthfulness. Reid went on to develop a non-machine-based system of interrogation based on specific types of questions and answers that uncover weaknesses the interrogator can use against a suspect to obtain a confession. Reid’s “Nine Steps” of psychological manipulation is one of the most popular interrogation systems in the United States today.

See full article.

See this interesting story of a man (identified as “AD” below) who has some brain damage due to which he has turned into a human chameleon. Whenever he meets someone, he “becomes” that person. So on meeting a doctor, he starts behaving like a doctor, and even makes up a story as to how he came about to be a doctor.

To investigate further, Giovannina Conchiglia and colleagues used actors to contrive different scenarios. At a bar, an actor asked AD for a cocktail, prompting him to immediately fulfil the role of bar-tender, claiming that he was on a two-week trial hoping to gain a permanent position. Taken to the hospital kitchen for 40 minutes, AD quickly assumed the role of head chef, and claimed responsibility for preparing special menus for diabetic patients. He maintains these roles until the situation changes. However, he didn’t adopt the role of laundry worker at the hospital laundry, perhaps because it was too far out of keeping with his real-life career as a politician.

See full article.

A couple of researchers from Norway showed a number of works of art to artists and non-artists and then used eye-tracking cameras and software to figure monitor what parts of the artwork they were actually looking at.

The yellow lines in the pictures above show how the eyes of the viewers scan the painting. The main finding is that there is a difference in the way artists look at a painting when compared to regular people. The image on the left shows how regular people spend much more time looking at the “key features” of a painting, while the image on the right shows how artists actually spend much more time looking at the other details.

Here’s another example:

Obviously, the image at the right represents the eye motion of artists. The idea is that artists have much more training in how to reproduce the details of a scene and hence they look at those with much more interest then the average person who wants to look at people and faces.

See full article.