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Confessions represent one of the most influential types of evidence, and research has shown that mock jurors often fail to dismiss unreliable confession evidence. However, recent studies suggest that jurors might believe in the false confession phenomenon more than they once did. One possible reason for this could be increased publicity regarding false confession cases. To assess this possibility, we administered an extensive online survey to a sample of potential jurors in the United States from 11 universities and Amazon Mechanical Turk. Perceptions of confession behaviors (as related to others and oneself), Miranda waivers, interrogation methods, dispositional risk factors, and confession admissibility and evidentiary weight were assessed, in addition to respondents' self-reported crime-media activity and familiarity with disputed confession cases. Respondents' perceptions were generally consistent with empirical research findings. Respondents believed suspects do not understand their Miranda rights; gauged interrogation tactics usage relatively accurately; viewed psychologically coercive tactics as coercive and more likely to result in false, rather than true, confessions; and recognized that confessions elicited via coercive measures should be inadmissible as evidence in court. However, respondents' perceptions did not align with research on interrogation length, and respondents did not fully appreciate the risk youth poses in interrogations. Moreover, being familiar with disputed confession cases resulted in more negative views of interrogations and confessions. Overall, potential jurors are seemingly more cognizant of false confessions and the tactics that elicit them than in the past, and evidence suggests that media outlets can be used to promote interrogation and confession knowledge.

The present review is intended as an overview of our current understanding of how children's individual characteristics, in terms of demographic, cognitive, and psycho-social variables, may influence their susceptibility to suggestion. The goals are to revisit conceptual models of the mechanisms of suggestibility, to provide an updated practical guide for practitioners, and to make recommendations for future research. Results suggest that children with intellectual impairment and those with nascent language skills may be particularly vulnerable to suggestion. Further, memory for separate events, theory of mind, executive function, temperament, and social competence may not be related to suggestibility, whereas additional work is needed to clarify the potential contributions of knowledge, stress, mental health, parental elaborative style, and adverse experiences/maltreatment to children's suggestibility.

Alcohol-intoxicated suspects’ confessions are admissible in U.S. courts; however, it is unknown how jurors evaluate such confessions. Study 1 assessed potential jurors’ perceptions of intoxication in interrogative contexts. Many respondents were unaware that questioning intoxicated suspects and presenting subsequent confessions in court are legal, and respondents generally reported they would rely less on intoxicated than sober confessions. In Study 2, potential jurors read a case about a defendant who had confessed or not while sober or intoxicated. Participants who read about an intoxicated defendant perceived the interrogation as more inappropriate and the defendant as more cognitively impaired than did participants who read about a sober defendant, and as a result, they were less likely to convict. Furthermore, intoxicated confessions influenced conviction decisions to a lesser extent than did sober confessions. Findings suggest that investigators might consider abstaining from interrogating intoxicated suspects or else risk jurors finding confessions unconvincing in court.

We propose that young children exhibit an order of encoding bias, such that they are inclined to report or act out events in the order in which they were originally encoded. This bias helps to explain why children assume that events they first hear described are in chronological order and why they often appear to understand "after" better than "before" when they are questioned about experienced events. Asking children about a sequence of events as a whole (in particular using "first") could avoid order of encoding biases, because children would not have to answer questions about events within the sequence. In the present study, 100 2-to 4-year-old children participated in creating simple stories in which a story child interacted with five objects, thus creating five unrelated events. Children then responded to questions asking them to identify which action occurred "before" and "after" the third event and which action occurred "first" and "last" in the story. We hypothesized that (1) children would exhibit a tendency to answer "before" and "after" questions with the event that occurred after the queried event, thus impairing performance on "before" questions; (2) children would respond more accurately to questions about what occurred "first" and "last" than to questions about "before" and "after"; (3) children would respond more accurately to questions about "first" than questions about "last," and (4) children's performance would improve with age. The hypotheses were supported. Critically, children's errors when responding to "before"/ "after" questions were consistent with an order of encoding bias.