From this cool article about interrogation techniques and false confessions:
In just three one-hour sessions, Shaw was able to convince 21 of her 30 college-age subjects that they’d committed a crime when they were around 12 years old — assaulted another child with a weapon, for instance — and had a run-in with the police as a result. She supplied details that were recognizable to the subjects — the location where the assault supposedly happened, who the other child was — drawn from information their parents provided in a questionnaire. Shaw tells me she designed her study to mimic the techniques used in some false-confession cases. “I’m essentially marrying poor interrogation tactics with poor therapeutic tactics,” she says. The results were so strong, in fact, that she stopped administering the experiment before she had run through her full sample.
