Richard Ofshe (born in 1941) is a Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a member of the advisory board of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation advocacy organization, and is known for his expert testimony relating to coercion in small groups, confessions, and interrogations.
His personal homepage at that institution lists his areas of interest to be coercive social control, social psychology, influence in...
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Richard Ofshe (born in 1941) is a Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a member of the advisory board of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation advocacy organization, and is known for his expert testimony relating to coercion in small groups, confessions, and interrogations.
His personal homepage at that institution lists his areas of interest to be coercive social control, social psychology, influence in police interrogation, and influence leading to pseudo-memory in psychotherapy.
Ofshe has been characterized as a "world-renowned expert on influence interrogation". He believes that coerced confessional testimony is extremely unreliable, and stated in a Time Magazine article that "Recovered memory therapy will come to be recognized as the quackery of the 20th century." In a more recent Time Magazine article in 2005, Ofshe is quoted as saying that false testimony does not just occur through coercion, but may also occur in instances of ...
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