Turning shame to fame: assessing personality traits, psychopathy, and narcissism in relation to prospective voluntary false confessions

Sammanfattning: The current study examined the effects of personality traits, psychopathy, and narcissism in the context of voluntary false confessions. The administration of various self-report measures in a sample of university students (N= 485) to assess personality traits, psychopathy, narcissism, and self-reported likelihood of voluntary falsely confessing enabled quantitative analysis of the interaction among these essential parameters. Narcissism and openness to experience accounted for 14% of the total variance in the likelihood of the voluntary false confessions in the male sample. Whilst narcissism and psychopathy accounted for 11% of the total variance in the female sample. These findings indicate that narcissism, psychopathy, and openness to experience are psychological factors that may have an impact on the likelihood of an individual confessing to a crime they did not commit, outside of the forensic settings.