PSYC 162 Midterm 1

forensic psychology

the use of psychological knowledge or research methods to advise, evaluate or reform the legal system; application of methods, theories and concepts of psychology to a wide variety of topics within the legal system; science-based

The Innocence Project

uses DNA testing to exonerate hundreds of innocent people who were wrongfully convicted and sent to prison; in most of these cases, they committed their crimes before DNA testing, evidence was saved, and is now being retested

Hugo Munsterberg

wrote On the Witness Stand; anticipated much of what forensic psychology is focused on today; student of Wilhelm Wundt; believed that psychology should be applied to practical concerns (e.g. to the legal setting)

interview

subject is a witness to a crime; goal is to elicit accurate (factual) information to facilitate the investigation

interrogation

subject is a person suspected of having committed a crime; goals are to establish if the suspect is the perpetrator and elicit accurate information to facilitate the investigation

Roebers and Schneider (2000)

3 weeks after seeing a short video, children were especially likely to "remember" information suggested by the interviewer; at week 4, both children and adults performed worse if they had been exposed to misleading questions

parts of a conventional interview

warm-up period (inform with ness about the subject of the interview, reduce anxiety); main body (use open-ended questions, phrase questions positively not suggestively, place questions is chronological order); wrap-up (review answers, ask if anything was left out)

forensic hypnosis

an investigative memory retrieval technique used to enhance recall in legally relevant situations; not useful enough to convict but can be used for investigative purposes; Texas and Nevada are the only states that allow hypnotically refreshed recall for use in criminal and civil cases; hard to regulate practitioners

hypnosis

a state of increased receptivity to suggestion characterized by an altered state of consciousness

Chowchilla

example of successful forensic hypnosis; bus driver was able to remember license plate number of kidnappers' van after hypnosis

cognitive interview

a different approach to enhancing recall; used mostly with adults; uses 4 mnemonics (reconstruction [of crime scene], report everything, change chronology, change perspective)

real-world (true crime) studies

studies in which crimes are captured on CCTV, which can be used to validate interview recollections

eyewitness memory is unreliable

this statement is FALSE!!! no kind of forensic evidence is 100% reliable; should be asking when it is reliable and when it is not; textbooks and researchers get this wrong b/c they don't test contaminated vs. uncontaminated evidence

important interview considerations

interview should be conducted soon after the witnessed event (b/c memory can be contaminated); pay attention to confidence (confidence is positively correlated with reliability)

McMartin Preschool Case

Ray Buckey arrested on child molestation charges; parents sent letters by police; improper interviewing techniques implanted false memories of sexual abuse

most dangerous eyewitness

one who changes from low to high confidence

interviewing minors

a spontaneous report of having been abused, especially when the child provides consistent, credible details of the incident in age-appropriate language is very likely credible

NICHD Investigative Protocol

similar to cognitive interview but for children; developed by researchers at NICHD; includes an introduction phase (clarify child's task, explain the ground rules), rapport-building phase (create relaxed environment, describe neutral event in detail); elicits more trustworthy information; basically less suggestive and more invitation

what to avoid in interviews

close-ended prompts (yes or no questions); leading prompts (suggest incidents that the child has not mentioned

what to do in interviews

say "ok" or "go on" (signal that the interviewer expects more information); repeat back answers; invite interviewee to give more details

custodial interrogation

interrogation in which the freedom of movement is significantly restricted, a reasonable person would have felt he or she was not at liberty to end the interrogation and leave

Miranda Rights

the rights to remain silent (not answer questions), to have an attorney present during questioning, to have an appointed attorney when financial need exists, to acknowledge understanding of rights; goals: to discourage police from using coercion and to prevent involuntary confessions; if the suspect in police custody has not been "Mirandized," any subsequent confession can be excluded at trial

suspects and Miranda rights

80% of suspects waive their Miranda rights and are subject to interrogation (90%+ for juveniles); innocent people feel they have nothing to hide and often waive their Miranda rights (may lead to false confession)

juries and confessions

with a confession, juries tend to reach a guilty verdict; fundamental attribution error

fundamental attribution error

tendency to overemphasize dispositional factors (i.e. something about the person) while minimizing situational factors (i.e. something about the situation) to explain an individual's behavior (such as a confession); jurors interpret a confession as a reflect of actual guilt, discounting situational factors such as coercion

which interrogation condition is best?

how to maximize guilty and minimize innocent - increase hit rate and decrease false alarm rate; hit rate and false alarm rates are NOT related to one another (one does not affect the other); find the highest ROC curve

ROC (Receiver Operating Characteristic)

plot all hit/false alarm rates on scatterplot (with hit rate as one axis and false alarm rate as the other); plot line m=1; curve above m=1 means that you are getting information; want the higher curve

if all points of the ROC are on the same line, you are arguing about...

value trade-offs (i.e. do you prefer more hits or false alarms)

4 types of false confessions

instrumental coerced; instrumental voluntary; authentic coerced; authentic voluntary

instrumental coerced false confession

occurs as a result of a long or intense interrogation; suspect confesses to crimes they know they did not commit; most common type of false confession in criminal cases; suspects become convinced that the only way to end the interrogation or to receive a more lenient treatment is to agree that they committed the crime in question; example: Michael Crowe psychologically tortured for two days in interrogation and finally confessed, saying "I'm only saying this b/c it's what you want to hear"; example: Central Park Jogger - 5 black and Hispanic teenagers confessed after 30 hours of interrogation

instrumental voluntary false confession

occurs when a suspect knowingly implicates himself in crimes he did not commit in an effort to achieve some goal (e.g. to protect someone or become famous)

authentic coerced false confession

occurs when, as a product of a long or intense interrogation, a suspect becomes convinced, at least temporarily, that he may have actually committed the crime; in most cases, the confessor does not develop false memories but, instead, comes to believe that he may have committed the crime despite having no memory of doing so; example: Peter Reilly confesses to his mother's murder after 9 hours in interrogation (including the police's false evidence ploy that he failed the polygraph)

authentic voluntary false confession

occurs when someone suffering from delusions (or mental illness) confesses to a crime with little or no pressure from interrogation; example: John Mark Karr confesses to the murder of JonBenet Ramsey after becoming obsessed with case details

risk factors for false confessions

adolescence; cognitive and/or intellectual disabilities; extraordinary duration (majority of interrogations last 30-120 min, in false confession interrogations lasted an average of 16.3 hours); interrogation tactics (including lying/false evidence ploys, minimization)

admissibility of confessions

must be given voluntarily and by a competent person (i.e. can't be a voluntary authentic false confession); cannot be elicited via overtly coercive tactics; judge may rule that a confession was coerced and therefore inadmissible but such rulings are rare

potential solutions to false confessions

video recording of interrogations; limit duration of interrogation; ban the "false evidence ploy"; special protections for vulnerable populations (e.g. juveniles and cognitively impaired); know false alarm as well as hit rate

Paul Ekman

one of the foremost experts on deception detection; assumption for lie detection: any ability to detect a lie requires that the lie arouse emotion; believes that "high stakes" lies arouse microexpressions

microexpressions

facial expressions that "leak through" attempts to mask lying; present when a person is telling a "high stakes" lie

low vs. high stakes lies

low stakes lies do NOT elicit emotion; high stakes lies elicit microexpressions

hit rate

a person is guilty and deemed guilty; don't know anything if you just know this information (also need to know the false alarm rate)

false alarm rate

a person is innocent but deemed guilty

Levine et al. (2014)

what makes an expert adept at lie detection is not the passive observation of sender demeanor but the active prompting of diagnostic information (i.e. interrogation); participants played a trivia game with a confederate for a cash prize for each correct answer and a penalty for each incorrect answer; confederate encourages participant to cheat; interviews (5 federal agents) were correct in guessing who cheated and didn't 98% of the time (hit rate = 85%, false alarm rate = 0%)

people are not bad at detecting lies

undergrads can guess better than chance, police are better, secret service agents are the best; rates are better when interrogator is able to actively question the individual

polygraph

an instrument that simultaneously records changes in physiological processes such as heartbeat, blood pressure, and electrical resistance of the skin

underlying theory of polygraph

when people lie they also get measurably nervous about lying

William Moulton Marston

student of Munsterberg; discovered correlation between blood pressure and arousal during lying

John Augustus Larson

rookie police officer in Berkeley police department; improved Marston's test through continuous recording of blood pressure; was the first to apply lie detection to the real world

RIT (Relevant-Irrelevant Test)

ask some irrelevant and relevant questions; if the arousal to the relevant questions is more than that of the arousal to the irrelevant questions, the person is lying

CQT (Comparison Question Test)

similar to RIT but add a probable-lie detection question (a question that induces people to lie); if the arousal to the relevant questions is more than that of the arousal to the irrelevant (probable-lie) questions, the person is lying

GKT (Guilty Knowledge, Concealed Information Test)

present one true and several false details of the crime that has not been publicized so that the true answer will only be known by the perpetrator; innocent suspects will not be more aroused to the true item but guilty suspects will be; if the arousal to the true detail is more than that of the arousal to the false details, the person is guilty

the polygraph will tell you whether a person is lying or not

NOT TRUE!!! an expert has to decide whether the polygraph data means that the person is lying (the machine doesn't just tell you yes or no)

GKT study (Carmel et al., 2003)

participants were instructed to enter the office of a named TA in psychology and steal a CD with a red case containing an exam; participants were told to convince the examiner that they were innocent; GKT performed using details such as color of the CD case, name of the TA and subject of the exam

polygraph scoring

is arbitrary!!!! examiner decides where the cut-off (for lying vs. telling the truth) is; can change the ROC curve by changing the cut-off -- it's the same polygraph machine, the examiner is just changing how much evidence he needs to call an individual a liar

conservative polygraph scoring cut-off

an examiner decides that he needs more physiological evidence to call the individual a liar; more reluctant to call person a liar; hit and false alarm rates go down

liberal polygraph scoring cut-off

an examiner decides that he need less physiological evidence to call the individual a liar; hit and false alarm rates go up

polygraphs work reasonably well in lab studies

true!!! and if anything, field studies are better than lab studies at detecting liars

problems for regular (real world) use of the polygraph

testing is not always immediately conducted after the crime (memory contamination, forgetfulness); countermeasures might be used more frequently; examiners may be biased in their interpretation of their lie-detection test (confirmation bias)

Green River Killer

serial killer who murdered 48 women in a rural area of Washington state; suspect (actual killer) was released after he successfully passed a lie detector

base rate problem

a problem that occurs with using a polygraph as a screening test; the number (rate) of examinees who are lying in comparison to those who are telling the truth is very low, leading to a high false alarm rate; therefore, even a good test (with a high hit rate and low false alarm rate) will wrongly identify far more innocent people than guilty people

if a polygraph were give to 10,000 job applicants and 10 were spies, 2 spies would pass the polygraph and 1,600 nonspies would fail (the gain of screening out 8 spies would need to be balanced against the lost talents of 1,600 who erroneously "failed" the test)

Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals

SCOTUS ruled that the admissibility of scientific evidence should be determined case-by-case based on evidentiary hearings; judges as gatekeepers

Clarence Thomas' two concerns about polygraph testing

lack of consensus about scientific validity and reliability; polygraph evidence may usurp jury role

polygraph as coercion

polygraphs are used to induce confessions; presented as a opportunity to prove innocence; according to police interrogation manuals, whether you agree or resist to take the test is diagnostic of guilt

jurors and the polygraph

jurors generally find results persuasive; results can change the outcome of a trial; experts are more skeptical than general public

fMRI

action of the brain is captured by taking a photo of how much oxygen is being used in every part of the brain at a given point in time, every two seconds; then these photos are strong together to form a moving image of brain activity; being used to detect "where" lying occurs in the brain; Langleben et al. (5 of clubs) study

Muller v. Oregon (1908), Brandeis Brief

opened the door for US courts to use social scientific evidence

legal realism

a movement in the late 1920s and 1930s that reenergized social science and law; believed that judges actively constructed the law through their interpretations of evidence and precedent

Brown v. Board of Education

first ruling to make explicit use of research provided by social scientists

culture

describes a group of people who tend to share basic assumptions about the relative importance of competing goals, how disputes should be resolved and what procedures to follow in striving for goals

psychology vs. law

descriptive vs. prescriptive; emphasize groups vs. individual; based on empiricism vs. authority; objective vs. adversarial

psychologists' roles in law

advisors (trial consultants, write briefs), evaluators, and reformers

trial consultants

hired psychologists, by attorneys, to help with jury selection, witness preparation, or trial strategy; use psychological knowledge to attempt to shape the trial process in ways that produce favorable outcomes for paying clients

amicus curiae brief

summary of the relevant body of research and clarification of the overall meaning of a set of findings; useful tool for educating judges about relevant psychological research

evaluation research

research that evaluates the effectiveness of social programs to see if these programs are achieving stated goals; find out if and how a program works

judges as gatekeepers

judges, under Daubert, were told to assess the scientific validity of potential testimony before allowing purportedly scientifice evidence to be heard at trial

Daubert criteria for admissibility (4)

testability or falsifiability of the theory/technique; peer review; rate of error (how often a test or technique produces incorrect results); generally accepted

Daubert Trilogy

expanded the gatekeeping role of trial judges; includes Daubert, Joiner (appellate courts should not second-guess a trial judge's decision to exclude expert testimony), and Kumho (trial judge has the authority and responsibility to evaluate the validity and relevance of any proposed expert testimony)

judges and research

bad at distinguishing between high- and low-quality research; base their admissibility decisions on characteristics of the expert, such as education, experience, skill and knowledge of the subject matter

3 roles of expert witnesses (according to Michael J. Saks)

conduit-educator, philosopher-advocate, hired gun

conduit-educator

strives to present a full and accurate picture of the current state of psychological knowledge

philosopher-advocate

makes concessions to the adversarial climate of the courtroom and allows personal values to shape testimony

hired gun

sells out and capitulates to the adversarial demands of the courtroom

why might judges be reluctant to use social science evidence?

judges know little about empirical research and are unable/willing to make sense of it; judges tend to be self-confident, politically conservative and protective of their prestige and power

why do police prefer confessions to other types of evidence?

confessions save time (trials can be avoided b/c suspects who confess usually plead guilty); a confession may be the closest prosecutors can get to a guaranteed conviction (juries almost always convict defendants who have confessed to committing a crime)

pressured confession study

mock jurors had no problem recognizing that the high-pressure confession was coerced and they report that they disregarded the involvuntary confession but their verdicts indicated otherwise; low, high, no pressure: 62% conviction rate, 50%, 19%; put differently, even a clearly coerced confession boosted the rate of conviction by 31%

4 strategies of the Reid technique for interrogation

loss of control (remove familiarity); social isolation; certainty of guilt (e.g. evidence ploys); exculpatory scenarios (face-saving justifications or excuses for the crime)

interrogation-related regulatory decline

the process of interrogation results in a break down of self-regulation (the ability to control our thoughts, emotions and behaviors in pursuit of our goals); the process of police interrogation appears to be the primary cause of most false confessions

pros and cons of video recordings of interrogations

pros: subtleties and visual cues can be captured on camera; creates a permanent, objective reviewable record of the interrogation that can later be evaluated; has civilizing effects on the behavior of interrogators

cons: jurors often do not see recordings in their entirety (a brief recap may misrepresent what actually happened); psychological biases arise from the camera's point of view (camera aimed only at suspect vs. only interrogator vs. both)

equal-focus camera perspective

A neutral point of view in a video recording showing both the suspect and the interrogator; this positioning of the camera best enables jurors to assess the voluntariness of the confession and the coerciveness of the interrogation.

suggestive questions

questions that imply that the interviewer expects or desires a particular response or those that include options not volunteered by the child

initial interview

is likely to contain the clearest indicators of whether a child is telling the truth

hearsay testimony

testifying about what someone else said outside of court; allowed in all but 9 states when a child is the alleged victim in a crime; testimony of adult ___ was seen as more consistent, more credible, more complete and more accurate than the testimony of child witnesses

CCTV

an alternate method for present the testimony of children; study shows that its use reduced the amount of emotional distress children experienced and enabled children to give more accurate testimony

recovered memories

memories of a traumatic event that are suddenly recovered after a long period of time

repression

popularized by Freud; holds that painful, threatening or traumatic memories can be pushed out of conscious awareness; thought to occur unconsciously and involuntarily; little evidence supports this theory/concept (intrusion is more likely)

Ingram Case

over the course of 5 months, police repeateduly questioned Paul Ingram about the details of the alleged sexual abuse; they assisted his recall by telling him, over and over again, exactly how he had abused his children; Ingram falsely confessed; Richard Ofshe argued that Ingram was an exceptionally suggestible and imaginative person whose intense praying induced a trancelike state

Loftus study

asked participants to remember 4 childhood events, 3 were experiences reported by relatives, the last never happened; after 2 interviews conducted over a period of weeks, 25% of the people came to remember most or all of the implanted "lost in the mall" event

reasons for implanted memories

some techniques routinely used in therapy to search out childhood memories facilitate the production of detailed visual images that can later be mistake for real memories; expectancies seem to play a crucial role

explanations for recovered memories of sexual abuse

transience of memory (forgetting that occurs with the passage of time); lack of reminders of the abuse; more likely to forget if the abuser is a relative or trusted caretaker; some people may be better at keeping unpleasant experiences out of their minds

things that call for skepticism of allegedly recovered memories

recovered over time using suggestive or coercive techniques; began as vague images or feelings; involved repeated abuse that extended into adolescence; involve abuse taht occurred before the age of 3 or in very early childhood; involve extremely rare forms of abuse

police detectives' confidence and accuracy study

detectives were significantly more confident about the accuracy of their judgements than college students; detectives showed a bias toward judging false confessions as true (high false alarm rate); the tendency of detectives to infer guilt increased with job experience and interrogation training (training may wrongly increase confidence in lie-detection skills)