How Cops Use Psychology To Make You Talk

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Alok Kanojia (1:03)

Hey chat, welcome to the Healthy GamerGG podcast. I'm Dr. Ollo Kanoja, but you can call me Dr. K. I'm a psychiatrist, gamer, and co-founder of Healthy Gamer. On this podcast, we explore mental health and life in the digital age, breaking down big ideas to help you better understand yourself and the world around you. So let's dive right in.

Hey, y'all, today we're going to be analyzing the communication in police interrogation techniques. I'm Dr. Ollo Kanoja, a Harvard-trained psychiatrist, and I'll be breaking down which communication techniques work, which ones don't, and how they work. So let's dive in.

SPEAKER_5 (1:43)

Well, this video is incredibly disturbing to watch. The man being interrogated is Thomas Perez Jr. He reported his father missing. Fontana Police accused Thomas of killing his dad.

SPEAKER_6 (1:54)

It was August of 2018 Fontana Police were convinced Perez's father had been murdered. They thought Perez appeared suspicious.

SPEAKER_7 (2:01)

It's really concerning to me that he hasn't been back yet.

SPEAKER_6 (2:04)

They asked Perez to come to the station, and that's where they turned a missing person case into a 17-hour interrogation.

SPEAKER_2 (2:11)

You murdered your dad?

SPEAKER_8 (2:12)

No, I did not.

Alok Kanojia (2:13)

Yeah, so what's kind of scary about this, there's a couple of psychological principles here. So what's scary about this from a legal perspective, so they can ask him, is a 17-hour interrogation. They can ask him, did you murder your dad? Like 500 times, and he can say no 500 times. And then the 501st time they ask him, he says yes, and like that's what gets cited at trial. That's scary thing number one. Second thing is I think people oftentimes underestimate, grossly underestimate what psychological pressure does to you. So with like a 17-hour interrogation, your brain is going to be so fatigued, right? You're going to be so emotionally raw. Like all of your psychological defense mechanisms that are healthy won't be working. And psychological defense mechanism doesn't mean like you're like a master manipulator. This just means that at that point, you know, you're going to feel so raw, you're going to feel so terrible. Like you're kind of trying to make people happy. You're trying to just end these sorts of things. And then you can say all kinds of stuff. One thing that I think is a really good example of this is they did a lot of interesting psychological studies, I think, after World War II, on some of the behavior of like Nazis. So after World War II, during some of these, these criminal trials on the Nazis, people started designing psychological experiments to see how hard you could push people before they start complying. And there's a really awesome experiment where they set this, this experiment up, where basically you had a subject and the subject is in one room with a button and on, and they have a microphone and they can speak to somebody else that's on the other side of the wall. And there's a guy with a clipboard who's like wearing a lab coat and a clipboard. And he says, okay, you've got a button. And every time you hit the button, it's going to administer a shock to the person on the other side of the wall. And so basically, like they set the shock setting to one, and the guy with the lab coat instructs the person to like hit the button. The guy hits the button. And then someone on the other side is like, ow. And then the guy with the lab coat turns it up to two and they're like hit the button. And the guy like hits the button again. So it's like, ow.