When you do something wrong, there
are two typical reactions that pull in opposite directions. On the one hand, you might want to hide what
you have done. If nobody finds out, then
it may feel like you didn’t do it at all.
On the other hand, you might just want to confess what you have done
wrong. That gets the problem out into
the open and helps people to move forward.
A middle ground between these
possibilities is the partial confession.
In a partial confession, you admit to what you did wrong, but you don’t
admit to the full extent of it. The
partial confession seems like a great compromise. You get the benefit of admitting what you have
done, but you can make your transgression seem less extreme than it was.
A paper in the February, 2014
issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
by Eyal Peer, Alessandro Acquisti, and Shaul Shalvi suggests that partial
confessions may actually be worse than either a full confession or not
confessing at all.
First, one study looked at whether
people have a tendency to make partial confessions. Participants in an on-line study performed a
variety of tasks. In one task, they went
to another website that allowed people to flip a virtual coin and predict how
the coin would come out. They were asked
to flip the coin 10 times. Then, they
were told to report the number of guesses they got right. They got paid ten cents for each correct
guess.
Although the participants didn’t
know it, their actual predictions and coin flips were monitored, so the
experimenters knew whether a particular participant told the truth or
cheated. Overall about 35% of the
participants over-reported the number of flips they predicted correctly. (Almost nobody under-reported the number of
correct guesses, so this is cheating and not bad memory.)
Later in the study, participants
were given a chance to confess whether they cheated. They were told that they would be paid based
on what they reported even if they now admitted they had cheated. They were also told that there would be no
negative consequences of admitting that they had cheated.
Only about 18% of the participants
who cheated confessed. Of those who did
confess, the ones who cheated most were also the ones most likely to give
partial confessions. That is people who
over-reported by just a few guesses tended to give a full confession, while
those who over-reported a lot tended to give a partial confession.
Why do people give partial
confessions? Another study gave
participants a hypothetical situation like the one I just described. They were told that they had over-reported
and then were asked to assume that they had confessed fully, had not confessed
at all or gave a partial confession.
Each participant responded to only one of these possibilities. They rated whether they thought their story
would be credible and how they would feel after giving the confession.
Participants who were told to
imagine they had given a full confession rated themselves as being most
credible. Those told to imagine they had
given no confession rated themselves as least credible. Those who imagined a partial confession came
out in between. There was no difference
between groups in their prediction of how they would feel.
Another study looked at how
participants actually feel after confessing.
They gave participants an opportunity to cheat as in the study I
described earlier. In this study, participants
were asked to rate their mood at the end of the study. Unsurprisingly, participants in who did not
cheat at all had the lowest level of negative feeling at the end of the
study. Participants who gave a partial
confession actually had the highest level of negative feeling, greater than
that of either those who cheated and did not confess or those who cheated and
gave a full confession.
Finally, another study in this
series asked people to imagine they were hearing about people who might have
cheated in a task like the coin flipping task.
Participants found out that the individual reported an unlikely event
and then later heard a confession that was likely to be a full confession, a
partial confession, or no confession.
This study found that participants found the full confession most
credible, the absence of a confession least credible and the partial confession
to be in between the two.
Putting this all together, then,
it seems that partial confessions are not that valuable. They are somewhat more credible to others
than not confessing at all. But, the
partial confession actually makes the confessor feel worse than no confession
at all. One reason why partial
confessions create negative feeling is that discrepancies among thoughts are
often discomforting. The partial
confession forces confessors to think both about what they did and about what
they said. The partial confession
actually focuses more attention on the thing people did wrong than no
confession at all.
An interesting question for future
research is whether confessions act a little like forgiveness. In an earlier blog
entry, I described research suggesting that when people forgive others for
a transgression, they are better able to forget the details of what happened to
them than when they do not forgive.
Perhaps a full confession also helps transgressors to forget the details
of what they did wrong and to move on with their lives.
