When someone dials 911 to report a shooting, listeners expect a voice trembling with fear or grief. But what if the caller sounds composed?
A new study, published February 3, 2025, in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, shows that such calmness can trigger suspicion, leading both laypeople and police to view the caller as a potential perpetrator rather than a victim.
This misperception, rooted in violated expectations and moral typecasting, can set off confirmation biases that risk wrongful convictions.
Why Calmness Breeds Suspicion
The research, led by Jessica M. Salerno at Arizona State University, explores how emotional expression – or lack thereof – shapes perceptions of 911 callers.
The team hypothesized that low emotionality violates societal expectations for trauma responses, prompting listeners to morally typecast callers as capable of immoral acts.
“People commonly assume that individuals ‘should’ react to trauma, such as witnessing a violent crime, with high levels of affect,” the study notes, yet “emotions do not leave reliable ‘fingerprints.’” This mismatch can lead to dire consequences, as initial suspicions often snowball in criminal investigations.
They also examined how factors like caller gender and victim relationship shape these expectations, given stereotypes that women and those close to victims should display more emotion.
Experiments with Real and Simulated Calls
Across five studies, the team used both real and controlled 911 calls to test their theory.
Study 1 involved 943 Amazon Mechanical Turk participants who listened to real 911 calls where male or female callers reported a shooting with low, moderate, or high emotion, involving either their parents or a stranger. Participants rated suspicion, and whether they thought police should investigate further. Low-emotion callers were significantly more suspicious than moderate or high-emotion callers.
Studies 2 and 3 used simulated calls with 1,200 laypeople and 300 police officers, respectively, confirming that low emotion heightened suspicion by violating expectations.
Study 4 analyzed 88 real 911 calls, with 1,200 participants rating emotionality and suspicion, finding consistent results.
Conducted primarily online with U.S. participants, the studies controlled for gender and relationship variables, revealing that female callers and those reporting loved ones faced greater suspicion for low emotion due to stereotype-driven expectations.
A Threat to Justice
The findings carry weighty implications. “Wrongful convictions are growing at an alarming rate,” the study states, citing over 3,500 exonerations in the U.S. since 2012.
Cases like Michael Crowe, accused of his sister’s murder for seeming too calm, or Amanda Knox, targeted partly for inconsistent emotionality, highlight how these biases play out.
The study warns that “perceived emotionality is a nonevidentiary basis for suspicion” that can lead to misidentification or false confessions.
Compounding the issue, practices like “911 Call Analysis,” which claim to detect guilt through linguistic cues, risk amplifying these biases.
The study calls such methods “junk science,” noting that “police investigators’ (unfounded) confidence in their ability to judge behavior as ‘human lie detectors’ is one of the main sources of misclassification of an innocent person as a suspect.”
The research calls for reforming police training to reduce reliance on emotional cues and mitigate biases.
Until then, a calm 911 call could unwittingly cast an innocent person as a suspect, turning a plea for help into a perilous misjudgment.
As the study concludes, “The net result: Innocent people being morally typecast as more capable of being a perpetrator than a victim and wrongfully convicted – whose only crime was to violate expectations for what a normal plea for help looks like.”
Study Details:
- Publication: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
- Publication Date: February 3, 2025
- Title: “Failing to Express Emotion on 911 Calls Triggers Suspicion Through Violating Expectations and Moral Typecasting”
- Authors: Jessica M. Salerno, Samantha R. Bean, Nicholas D. Duran, Alia N. Wulff, Isabelle Reeder, Saul M. Kassin
- DOI: 10.1037/pspa0000412