Psychological research and applications have established that it is not just people with learning disabilities or serious mental illness who are likely to make false confessions. For a confession to be false, a person must either confess to a crime of which they are completely innocent, or overstate their involvement in the crime. False confessions can be voluntary or coerced. Although it is methodologically difficult to establish the frequency of false confessions, anecdotal evidence such as self-reports and case studies indicate that reported cases are only the "tip of the iceberg." It appears that young people are particularly vulnerable and often make false confessions in order to protect others. Standardized psychological tests have been designed to assess personality factors such as suggestibility and conformity that make some people more vulnerable than others. The reason people make false confessions is usually due to a combination of factors such as psychological vulnerability, the nature of the detention and police interrogation tactics. The notorious cases of false confessions which led to wrongful convictions of innocent people who then spent years in prison represent some of the worst cases of miscarriage of justice in Britain. One of these cases, that of Engin Raghip of the "Tottenham Three", will be discussed in the context of the admissibility of psychological evidence in order to demonstrate how the judiciary has increasingly come to accept the psychological notion that most people, under certain circumstances, are likely to make false confessions. To better understand why people confess to crimes they did not commit, Kassin and...... middle of paper. .....expert testimony to assess the reliability of contested confessions. The reason people make false confessions is usually due to a combination of factors such as psychological vulnerability, the nature of the detention and police interrogation tactics. Standardized psychological tests have been designed to assess personality factors such as suggestibility and conformity that make some people more vulnerable than others, but these should never be examined in isolation. Studies indicate that reported cases are only the “tip of the iceberg.” It appears that young people are particularly vulnerable and often make false confessions in order to protect others. It’s not just people with learning disabilities or serious mental illness who are likely to make false confessions; depending on the context, anyone can.