A confession is a statement - made by a person or by a group of persons - acknowledging some personal fact that the person (or the group) would ostensibly prefer to keep hidden. The term presumes that the speaker is providing information that he believes the other party is not already aware of, and is frequently associated with an admission of a moral or legal wrong:
In one sense it is the acknowledgment of having done something wrong, whether on purpose or not. Thus confessional texts usually provide information of a private nature previously unavailable. What a sinner tells a priest in the confessional, the documents criminals sign acknowledging what they have done, an autobiography in which the author acknowledges mistakes, and so on, are all examples of confessional texts.
Not all confessions reveal wrongdoing, however. For example, a confession of love is often considered positive both by the confessor and by the recipient of the confession, and is a common theme in literature. With respect to confessions of wrongdoing, there are several specific kinds of confessions that have significance beyond the social. A legal confession involves an admission of some wrongdoing that has legal consequence, while the concept of confession in religion varies widely across various belief systems, and is usually more akin to a ritual by which the person acknowledges thoughts or actions considered sinful or morally wrong within the confines of the confessor's religion. In some religions, confession takes the form of an oral communication to another person. Socially, however, the term may refer to admissions that are neither legally nor religiously significant.
Confession often benefits the confessor. Paul Wilkes characterizes confession as "a pillar of mental health" because of its ability to relieve anxieties associated with keeping secrets. Confessors are more likely to confess when the expected benefits outweigh the marginal costs (when the benefit of the offense to them is high, the cost to the victim is low, and the probability of information leakage is high). People may undertake social confessions in order to relieve feelings of guilt or to seek forgiveness from a wronged party, but such confessions may also serve to create social bonds between the confessor and the person to whom they are speaking, and may prompt the listener to reply with confessions of their own. A person may therefore confess wrongdoing to another person as a means of creating such a social bond, or of extracting reciprocal information from the other person. A confession may even be made in a self-aggrandizing manner, as a way for the confessor to claim credit for a misdeed for the purpose of eliciting a reaction to that claim.
In law, there is an exception to the hearsay rule that allows testimony concerning someone else's confession to be admitted if the statement had a great enough tendency "to expose the declarant to civil or criminal liability". The theory is that a reasonable person would not make such a false confession. In US law, a confession must be voluntary in order to admissible.
- Roger W. Shuy, The Language of Confession, Interrogation, and Deception (1998), p. 2-10.
- Jorge J. E. Gracia, A Theory of Textuality: The Logic and Epistemology (1995), p. 94-95.
- Giulio Marra, Shakespeare and this "imperfect" World: Dramatic Form and the Nature of Knowing (1997), p. 69, describing "the distinction between "to do" and "to confess", between having thoughts of love and confessing one's love, between the indetermination of a feeling and its final definition", as a theme that "creeps into the various stories".
- Charles Emil Kany, The Beginnings of the Epistolary Novel in France, Italy and Spain (1937), Volume 21, Issues 1-6, p. 19.
- Wilkes, Paul (2012). The Art of Confession: Renewing Yourself Through the Practice of Honesty. Workman Publishing. p. xi. ISBN 9780761168720.
Confession is also a pillar of mental health, for confession is about self-examination. It demands something for which there is no substitute: that we be honest with ourselves.
- Sznycer, Daniel; Schniter, Eric; Tooby, John; Cosmides, Leda (5 September 2014). "Regulatory adaptations for delivering information: The case of confession". Evolution and Human Behavior. doi:10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2014.08.008.
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