Guilt Detection Tests Can Be Beaten
Whodunnit? Dreamstime Good news for the guilty, bad news for law enforcement. The science of guilt is far from perfect. A new study says tests designed to prove guilt--tests that some law enforcement agencies use regularly--can be fooled. All it takes is a little will power. Guilt tests rely on the same basic premise: that incriminating memories bring up uncontrollable brain activity. The guilt tests, then, are designed to measure that involuntary brain activity. Event-Related Potential (ERP) is the name of a detection technique in which you place sensors on a suspect's scalp and ask him to distinguish between sets of items sprinkled with details relevant to a crime. The assumption is that the crime-related details will trigger the guilty person's memory--not so with an innocent person. Here's the thing: it's relatively easy to suppress guilty memories, the new study shows. Researchers at the universities of Kent, Magdeburg and Cambridge, and the...