Understanding the phenomena of psychological manipulation is particularly important for forensic psychology, which among other things deals with how legal evidence can be influenced by the psychological conditions of the witness.

The phenomenon of false confessions is perhaps the most significant example of this. It also appears that investigative forces in the US (but not only in the US) are easy to confuse conducting an interrogation with extorting a confession. It must be said that in the United States judicial system, the confession of a defendant assumes a decisive evidentiary value for the fate of a trial, even in cases where there is little factual evidence. In 25% of cases in which a person was exonerated thanks to DNA testing, the imputation was made through a false confession.

Even if you are thinking that you are not the types to confess to a rape or murder that you have not committed, research indicates that innocent people are particularly vulnerable during interrogations.

According to Redlich and Meissner (2009) in the United States there are different ways to conduct an interrogation in order to produce (or extort) a confession, all united by three phases:

❖ Isolation: the suspect is detained in a small room and left alone; he is not allowed to contact a trusted lawyer. The detained subject is thus encouraged to live a precarious psychological condition, with feelings of anxiety and insecurity.

❖ Confrontation: investigators assume on principle that the person they face is the culprit. So, they communicate explicitly, that the evidence is in hand, and allows them to incriminate the person (it is useful to remember that the police are legally allowed to lie); that he should not deny his faults, and that these have serious consequences.

❖ Minimization: in this phase the person who conducts the interrogation assumes an empathic attitude with the suspect, in order to gain his trust, offers him justifications for the crime he (not) committed.

Lovers of the TV series will be able to observe an interrogation thus described in the first season of True Detective, operated by a convincing Matthew McConaughey. We can therefore conclude that interrogations are an ideal setting for exercising psychological manipulation.

It is interesting to observe how these methods of conducting interrogations seem to adapt to Walker's circular model of abuse (1979): according to the author, the genesis of domestic violence would follow four phases, indicated as:

1) Increased tension: communication between the abusive partner and the victim is interrupted, the latter feels frightened and feels the need to appease the abuser's anger.

2) Accident: the abusive partner shows anger towards the victim and exercises threats and intimidation, verbal, physical or behavioral abuse occurs.

3) Reconciliation: the abusive partner apologizes and justifies himself by blaming the victim, denies the abuse behavior or minimizes its severity.

4) Calm down: the accident is "forgotten", and no other abuse occurs. Partners experience a fictitious "honeymoon".

In light of the similarities between the two models, it does not seem risky to say that false confessions are much more than a manipulation technique, but appear as a subtle and refined form of torture: even if this term never appears in the models described, it is evident that the victim of these processes finds himself living in a state of fear and submission, with the impossibility of asking for help or leaving the relationship.

It follows that the only way to get by is to agree to the demands of those who hold power in the relationship.

Another factor that can help subject those who are questioned is the lack of rest. Arecent study investigated the role of sleep deprivation using an experimental method.

The dependent variable consisted in the admission of having accomplished a fact that had not been committed, namely the production of a false confession. The 50% of the subjects assigned to the experimental group, who had spent a blank night at the university laboratory, produced a false confession, against 18% of the control subjects.