The Virtual Interrogation Subjective Experience (VISE) Project: Using Virtual Reality to Measure Perceptions of Police Interviews

Confessions are an exceptionally powerful form of legal evidence; they pave the way to conviction and punishment. U.S. law requires that upon taking a criminal suspect into custody, police must issue Miranda warnings about the suspect’s rights to silence and counsel. During questioning, police are prohibited from using coercion that “overbears the suspect’s will” to extract a confession. Understanding perceptions of custody and coercion is essential because violations of these laws and principles can lead to inaccurate outcomes, such as false confessions and wrongful convictions. Moreover, when a confession is false, an innocent person is punished while the true perpetrator remains at large, which poses a significant threat to public safety. Judges and juries are tasked with evaluating custody and coercion in legal proceedings, and these decisions have serious and enduring consequences. Psychological science can deepen understanding of perceptions of custody and coercion and thereby help legal decision makers to assess custody and coercion in a transparent and consistent manner. Police interviews of subjects in custody are difficult to study in a way that is simultaneously scientifically rigorous, ethically conscious, and ecologically valid. This research harnesses Virtual Reality (VR), an innovative technological tool, to study perceptions of custody and coercion. The study introduces late adolescents and emerging adults to police interrogation in an immersive 3D environment. Study participants virtually “experience” an interrogation, scripted from a real case. Four VR conditions are designed to assess whether and how the type of interrogation strategy, which is a key factor that judges consider when evaluating the voluntariness of the interaction, affects perceptions of custody and coercion, as well as decision-making with respect to confessions. The investigators also compare outcomes across two non-VR conditions (standard 2D video and a transcript), which mimic real-world materials that judges evaluate in disputed confession cases. This research generates actionable data and findings about people’s interrogation experiences in order to promote fairer, more accurate legal processes and outcomes that ultimately benefit countless individual defendants, victims, and society at large. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.