

In a paper published in The Journal of Economic Psychology a team from the University of Tilburg, and the University of Twente in the Netherlands extend the work done on trustworthiness to attractiveness while also extending the scope of control variables on online market places but specifically on Airbnb hosts by examining 1020 listings in New York.
The Economist also featured this in one of its issues. The authors find that controlling for other things such as space of apartment etc. the perceived attractiveness increases by 1 point leading to a 2.8% increase in rental prices. However, they do not categorise it as a beauty premium, they argue that attractive host would be perceived as healthy hosts, and the opposite would be true for unattractive host and therefore attractiveness becomes a proxy for healthy, it is an interesting result in the light of the last two years.
Unattractive hosts or perceived unattractive hosts faced a 6.8% ugliness discount from their earnings. The trustworthy hosts also charged slightly less than their shifty looking hosts. As a proof of algorithm/digital bias, and racial bias they found that black hosts ended up getting a 10.1% less for their apartments as compared to the white hosts. Also, if you are on AirBnB and wish to earn more and get better ratings, smile more, as smiling hosts tend to make 3.6% more than sullen ones. Also, they tend to have lesser complaints. An upshot of this study is that AirBnB has set up a team to tackle the issue of racial, and digital bias. We will be excited to see if and when the research comes out and the issue of profiling has decreased. The study can be found for free here, and to those of you who like to dig into the data the pre-registered data can be found here. A brief history of how Airbnb tried tackling the racial issue if it interests you can be found here.
And now we find out what happened in Reyjkavik on a winters night in 1974 and how it impacts fairness, distributive justice and psychological, and behavioural research even today.
The Reykjavik Confessions
Why would six young people confess to murders they hadn't committed? That's what happened in the Guðmundur and Geirfinnur case in 1976 in Iceland. Two young men had disappeared ten months apart in 1974. Two people were arrested for a different crime and were somehow found to be involved in them! They implicated four people, they were proven to be innocent. Meanwhile the bodies had never been found but years later six people had been arrested and charged with their murders, also for implicating the people police had arrested earlier.
There has been no forensic evidence – the only “evidence” the police had were the confessions. This is where it becomes a sinister tale of groupthink, and all of the biases in BS land!
A Gallup Poll released in May 1997 showed an all-time high distrust of the Supreme Court and the Police in Iceland. In Iceland, a small, sparsely populated country with Reykjavik as a nerve centre and where the community spirit is fairly high, this was a shock.The roots of this distrust lay in two incidents that have become a part of the national folklore, or as an Icelandic journalist puts it, 'national consciousness'. It all began when a young 18-year-old labourer went to a party in 1974 in the nearby community centre. He left just after midnight, intending to walk 10 kilometres (6.2 miles) back to his house. He was last seen by two of his friends who saw him with a man they did not recognise, but they seemed to be together. No one saw them after that. He never reached his home. The Gudmundur and Geirfinnur cases involved the disappearance of two unrelated men on 27 January and 19 November 1974, respectively.
Gudmundur's disappearance was not viewed as suspicious at the time. In contrast, the Keflavik's Sheriff's Department viewed Geirfinnur's disappearance as suspicious and linked it to smuggling of alcohol, apparently without any investigative foundation. Soon after the Keflavik investigation started unfounded rumors began to spread that two men linked to a popular Reykjavík Club (“Klúbburinn”) were responsible for Geirfinnur's disappearance.No suspects were officially identified and the investigation was closed within a few months, but suddenly officially reopened by the Reykjavík police in January 1976, with deleterious consequences for fairness and justice. The key mistake appears to have been the Reykjavík investigators' focus on implicating men associated with Klúbburinn in Geirfinnur's disappearance.
There was a lot of pressure on the police to solve this case, and this is where things begin to go slightly awry. Erla and her then partner Saevar were arrested on 13th December 1975, they were both kept in solitary cells, and interrogated. On 20th of December 1975 after a week in custody she gave a witness statement implicating Saevar, and Kristjan as being involved in a possible murder. The two prime suspects were interviewed by the police quite a lot. Erla was interviewed 105 times, with her lawyer present only 3 times. Saevar was interviewed 180 times and his lawyer was present 49 times.
In February 1980, Iceland's Supreme Court convicted three men of killing Geirfinnur: Saevar Ciesielski [SC], Kristján Vidarsson [KV], and Gudjón Skarphédinsson [GS]. Erla Bolladóttir [EB], for perjury. At the same time, the Iceland Supreme Court convicted SC and KV, along with a third man, Tryggvi Leifsson [TL] of killing Gudmundur. A fourth man, Albert Skaftason [AS] was convicted of contaminating the crime scene. All six convicted persons received prison sentences ranging from 12 months [AS] to 17 years [SC] (Gudjonsson, 2018) in different prisons, where SC was transferred to a prison which has since been classified as being inhumane. The prison has since been demolished.
The two cases were investigated jointly and tried together. However, there were no dead bodies, no forensic evidence, or any credible witness statements. The only evidence used against them was their inconsistent and incoherent coerced confessions. The prevailing pervasive guilt presumptive attitude and behaviour across the police, prosecution, remand prison, and judiciary led to Iceland's greatest miscarriage of justice, which has only been recently corrected, but is still a point of contention in the country.
Brief Chronology of Events
- Early December 1975: A police informant implicates SC, KV, and TL in the disappearance of Gudmundur.
- 12–13 December SC and EB are arrested on suspicion of fraud and remanded in custody. After 7 days in custody EB is unexpectedly questioned about Gudmundur's disappearance and she implicates SC and KV, after which she is released from custody. Soon thereafter SC is interviewed and implicates one further person [TL].
- Toward the end of December, the investigators begin to question EB about SC's possible knowledge about Geirfinnur's disappearance [police kept no records of these interviews]. Subsequently EB was taken as a witness on three separate occasions to a remand prison for a total of 11 h before she gave a formal witness statement on 23 January 1976, implicating four men apparently of interest to police, known as the “Klúbburinn men.” The four Klúbburinn men were subsequently arrested, after both SC and KV had also implicated them in Geirfinnur's disappearance.
- In May 1976, the Klúbburinn men were released from custody without a charge. The investigators then turned their attention to implicating SC and KV, and later Gudjón Skarphedinsson [GS] in the murder of Geirfinnur.
Source: The Science-Based Pathways to Understanding False Confessions and Wrongful Convictions (Gudjonsson, 2021)
False Memories Affect Behaviour
Source: Association for Psychological Science
Summary:Do you know someone who claims to remember their first day of kindergarten? Or a trip they took as a toddler? While some people may be able to recall trivial details from the past, laboratory research shows that the human memory can be remarkably fragile and even inventive. New research shows that it is possible to change long-term behaviours using a simple suggestive technique. (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/08/080819160245.htm)
Solitary Confinement

Why should we care about a case in Iceland? Now with DNA, why should we care about confessions? Turns out that in the post DNA world the false confessions keep on increasing. In a landmark study Drizin & Leo showed that out of 125 proven cases of false confession, around 30% had multiple false confessors. Having more than one suspect increases the risk of false confession as even one false confession, is used to increase the coerce confession from other suspects.
This case according to Anthony Adeane, the writer of Out of Thin Air, also a documentary of the same name, is a classic example of bias, profiling, and using coercive techniques to somehow close a major case. According to retired Icelandic detective and now an academic psychologist Gisli H. Gudjonsson, who has been fascinated by the case, wrote in his landmark paper the following.
This becomes a classic cumulative experiment in game theory. Something that is on shaky ethical, and legal grounds. There are other issues here at play which point to concern that still exist. The suspects were handed very, very long stay in isolation cells, almost from the start. Let me here tell you about an infamous experiment that happened in 1950's, a psychologist Harry Harlow locked monkeys in a cage from which they could not escape, after a couple of days. The monkeys started to self harm, walk in circles, and rock on their feet in profound distress. It was termed 'the pit of despair'.
In fact Stuart Grassian, a Harvard psychologist who is an expert on solitary confinement, and he has found that most inmates report intrusive thoughts, hallucinations, and overt paranoia.
How confessions are elicited?

The Greater Good Fallacy
At the heart of psychology is the conundrum of intentions. Who is an expert? It can be argued that a police detective is more of an expert in solving a crime than those who are not part of the official, or unofficial detective force (if Sherlock works for you). The detective force we will agree has an edge in expertise in matters of solving a crime. It is also a close knit fraternity, as any group that has to work close, and their life hangs in the balance, which is dependent on trust.
The group members share a position on most things, reinforcing one another's sense of understanding. The social psychologist Irving Janis called this groupthink. A like minded knowledge community discusses an issue and becomes more polarised. The failure to appreciate the fact that most things are not absolutely knowable (try explaining to yourself how a water cistern functions!) add a community that you are embedded in and supports your position (think proud boys and January 6th storming of the Capitol) and it is a perfect recipe for dangerous social positions.
The use of behavioural informed insights in detection is useful and needed because as Johnathan Haidt's work has shown that moral conclusions come from intuitions and feelings, and not from a place of reasoning. It can be inferred that it is a case of values, and not always consequences. In the extreme the greater good fallacy can end up inflicting more harm than good. In the end framing an issue ends up deciding the result, more often than we would like it to be not true. We like to take positions that are ingrained in our culture, and the duty of providing information lies with a community of knowledge which has to make the wider context easily available. If something is understood better safeguards can be implemented better, redoing to a large extent the problem caused by groupthink.

- Out of Thin Air on Netflix https://www.netflix.com/in/title/80119349
- Out of Thin Air, the book https://www.flipkart.com/out-thin-air/p/itmezhzhfynwpyux?pid=9781786487483&lid=LSTBOK9781786487483GTA7AC&marketplace=FLIPKART&cmpid=content_book_15083003945_u_8965229628_gmc_pla&tgi=sem,1,G,11214002,u,,,556262839325,,,,c,,,,,,
- The Reykjavik Confessions, the book https://www.amazon.in/Reykjavik-Confessions-Incredible-Icelands-Notorious/dp/1785942883/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3LUC59WCRLU1N&keywords=the+Reykjavik+confessions&qid=1648878670&sprefix=the+reykjavik+confessions%2Caps%2C201&sr=8-1
- The Suspicious Case of the Reykjavik Confessions on Buzzfeed Unsolved https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaLdHd2J-xM&t=542s
