Psychopathy, Interrogations, and Confessions

Vocabulary practice flashcards covering corporate psychopathy, assessment bias, the cognitive neuroscience of fear, heroic traits, the Reid Technique, false confession pathways, and the Mr. Big procedure.

Corporate Psychopaths

Individuals with psychopathic traits operating within organizational settings whose manipulative behaviors and lack of empathy are often misattributed to positive business traits like 'leadership,' 'decisiveness,' and 'visioning.'

Pawns and Patrons

Coworkers and superiors manipulated by corporate psychopaths to advance their agenda; patrons offer organizational backing or protection, while pawns are used to accomplish tasks without realizing they are being exploited.

Ewert v. Canada (2015)

A Federal Court case in which Métis inmate Jeffrey Ewert established that risk assessment instruments (including the PCL-R) used by Correctional Service Canada were unreliable and culturally biased when applied to Indigenous prisoners, violating Section 7 of the Charter.

Section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms

A constitutional section guaranteeing the right to life, liberty, and security of the person, which was found to be violated in Ewert v. Canada due to the use of culturally unvalidated risk assessment tools.

Statement of Concerned Experts (2020)

A formal consensus by 13 psychology and law experts concluding that the PCL-R cannot precisely or accurately predict an individual's risk for serious institutional violence in custodial facilities and should not be used in high-stakes decisions like capital sentencing.

Urbach-Wiethe Disease

A rare genetic condition causing localized calcification and destruction of the amygdala bilaterally, demonstrated in Patient SM, which results in the selective and complete loss of the ability to experience fear.

Oak Ridge Social Therapy Unit (STU) Study

A psychiatric prison study by Harris and Rice testing an extreme, coercive 'defense-disrupting therapy' (using LSD, methedrine, and nude encounter marathons) that decreased subsequent violent recidivism for non-psychopaths but significantly increased it for psychopaths.

Social Salience Hypothesis

A theory suggesting that oxytocin can improve social functioning in individuals with psychopathic traits by enhancing emotion recognition and modulating neural networks responsible for empathy and aggression.

Fearless Dominance

A psychopathic personality factor encompassing social boldness, calmness under pressure, and immunity to anxiety that has been empirically linked to acts of heroism and altruism toward strangers.

Successful Psychopathy Scale (SPS)

A 54-item psychometric instrument evaluating adaptive and maladaptive traits of psychopathy across six facets: callous-unemotional traits, decisiveness, confidence, stress immunity, social potency, and manipulation.

The Reid Technique

A nine-step interrogation method developed in 1962 designed to decrease a suspect's perception of the consequences of confessing while escalating their internal anxiety regarding continued deception.

Alternative Question (Reid Step 7)

A coercive step in the Reid Technique where investigators offer two incriminating alternatives (one face-saving/understandable and one repulsive/callous) to elicit a primary admission of guilt, posing an elevated risk of false confessions in intellectually vulnerable suspects.

Phased Interview Model (PIM)

A suspect interviewing framework introduced by the RCMP in 2014 as Canada's national standard, utilizing a non-accusatory, information-gathering approach grounded in rapport-building and the legal standard of voluntariness.

Behaviour Sequence Analysis (BSA)

A methodological approach, also called lag sequence analysis, that decomposes time-extended interactions into discrete categories using Markov chains to identify specific chains of interviewer techniques and suspect responses.

Speech Act

An utterance evaluated primarily as an action with regard to its intent, purpose, or psychological effect, such as the leading questions utilized by interrogators in the Brendan Dassey case.

Misclassification Error

The initial mistake in an investigation where detectives falsely conclude that an innocent individual is guilty, often following faulty behavioral lie detection cues.

Coercion Error

The second stage in a false confession pathway where law enforcement subjects an innocent suspect to intense psychological pressure, manipulation, and confinement until confessing appears to be the only viable exit strategy.

Contamination Error

The interrogation error where police feed non-public crime details, scenarios, or leading facts to a suspect, which the suspect then regurgitates to create a convincing, fact-rich false confession.

Voluntary False Confession

A false confession provided without external police pressure or interrogation, often driven by a pathological need for attention, mental illness, delusions of guilt, or a desire to protect the true offender.

Coerced-Compliant False Confession

A false admission offered during interrogation to escape an unbearable situation, avoid threatened harm, or obtain an promised benefit, during which the individual remains internally aware of their innocence.

Coerced-Internalized False Confession

A false confession that occurs when suggestive interrogation methods and deceptive evidence lead an innocent suspect to genuinely believe that they committed the crime.

Mr. Big Technique

A Canadian undercover investigative tactic where police fabricate a fictitious criminal organization, recruit a suspect, and offer financial gain and social inclusion to induce a confession to the organization's boss.

R. v. Hart (2014)

A Supreme Court of Canada ruling declaring confessions obtained through the Mr. Big technique presumptively inadmissible unless the Crown proves their reliability outweighs their prejudicial effect and demonstrates that no police abuse of process occurred.

Entrapment (R. v. Mack, 1988)

A legal ruling establishing that entrapment occurs when police go beyond merely providing an opportunity to commit a crime and instead actively induce an offence through persistent harassment, threats, or exploitation of vulnerability.