PSYC325- Psychology in Legal contexts

what are DNA exonerations?

when convicted criminals from eyewitness testimonies are proven innocent due to new DNA testing.

what is the innocence project?

organisation looks to identify wrongfully convicted criminals. Use DNA testing. 30-40% of their cases have been proven not guilty thus proving how unreliable eyewitnesses are.

what is the highest contributing cause to wrongful convictions?

eyewitness errors

what are the components of eyewitness memory?

perceptions (how we perceive things and interpret them).Memory (encoding, storage, retrieval). problems can occur at any of these stages.

how might previous assumptions interfere with memory?

your brain assumptions about everything are due to previous knowledge and experience. first impressions can also alter perception.

what are some problems with perception?

the brain does not specifically encode what the eyes sore rather it is based on prior knowledge and encoding what is believed to be relevant or what they think they saw.

what stimuli does perception rely on?

• past experience

• stereotypes

• expectations

• beliefs

• knowledge

what is a schema?

a blue print of what generally happens. beliefs and expectations concerning the nature, characteristics, behaviors, or functions of objects people and events. schemas drive your Behaviour.

how can our self concept or professional functioning affect schemas?

schemas are important to our self concept. professional functioning may be chronically activated and widely applied to incoming stimuli.

e.g., police are more likely to see drug deals even when they do not occur. generalise their knowledge to other scenarios.

how can temporary influences affect schemas?

Temporary influences (e.g., acute concerns or features of the context in which a stimulus is encountered) can trigger schema activation.
e.g., if you are worried about a certain mole, all of them become dodgy especially after research.

Washington Sniper

Example of how eyewitness testimony can interfere with conviction or investigation. Witnesses thought they saw a white van doing the shooting so police only looked for a white van when in fact the perpetrators were in a different kind of car.

what was the David Bain case?

Participants were primed to believe that it was either David who committed the murder of his father. They then listened to the tape and had to say whether or not they hear David say “I killed the prick”

• Extremely few of those who had been primed to believe it was the father claim that they heard David say “i shot the prick”.

This is because the information that they had been given prior to listening to the tape influenced their perception of it.

how race can influence schemas?

Participants were primed with either a black face or a white face and then asked to classify things as either tools or weapons

- Those primed with a black face were faster to identify weapons, and more often mistook tools for weapons

- This was because the black face had activated a particular schema where by associations between black people and weapons were more strong than black people and tools (Payne, 2001)

are participants more likely to shoot a black or white unarmed person?

Computer simulation where participants were instructed to only shoot people holding weapons (ie. not a cellphone)

- Participants were more likely to shoot unarmed black people than unarmed white people (even police officers show this bias)

(Cornell, Park, Judd & Wittenbank)

what are some problems with memory and recall?

• not everything gets into memory

• lack of recall is not necessarily a retrieval problem.

• can not attend to, and encode everything that we experience

what is selective attention?

occurs when we miss things in our visual field or fail to notice changes in our environment.

what factors influence encoding?

• attention

• salience

• stress/arousal

• presence of a weapon

• selective attention

what experiment was used to show the effect of salience?

experiment whereby there was a staged theft in front of a group of students and the thieved item was either expensive or trivial. results showed that eyewitnesses made more accurate identifications when the crime was perceived as more serious.

what is the effect of stress/arousal on encoding?

Yerkes Dodson Law shows that optimal performance is achieved by some stress but not too much.

how does salience effect encoding?

showed participants a short movie of a bank robbery with either a violent or non-violent ending.

• those who watched the violent version had poorer memories for the detail seen immediately before the violence. (Loftus & Burn, 1982).

how does stress effect selective attention?

exposed people with or without spider phobia to a live spider in a jar

• memory for central events did not differ between the two groups

• spider phobic participants scored lower when asked about peripheral details. (music in background)

how does selective attention affect encoding?

when you specifically focus on a couple of key detail and fail to obtain other contributing factors. e.g., gorilla and basketball video.

what is cue utilisation theory?

people can only attend to a limited number of cues at any one time. As stress increases, their attention narrows to the stress-generating features.

what would the perfect study to test stress and encoding look like?

• the situation is ecologically valid (real like stress)

• the experience is controllable

• the degree of stress can be manipulated

• stress response is measured

• we can evaluate accuracy.

what experiment used the effect of stress and arousal on mistaken identification?

elite soldiers were "captured” and taken to a set up camp where they were either interrogated in high or low stress situations. 24 hours later were asked to pick out the interrogators in a line-up (Morgan et al, 2004)

• mistaken identifications were made by 51-68% of those under high stress

• mistaken identifications were made by 12-38% for those under low stress.

what is the weapon focus effect?

visual attention that eyewitnesses give to a perpetrators weapon during the course of the crime.

how might encoding memories vary in strength?

• amount of exposure (more exposure = better memory)

• age (children don’t encode as well as adults, adults have a basis of knowledge)

• salience: if it is important you will encode it more strongly

• knowledge: effect for age

how was the weapon focus effect shown?

participants saw slides of a customers pulling out either a cheque book or a handgun.

• participants made more correct identifications in the no weapon condition

• participants made more and longer eye fixations on the gun than on the cheque book.

• even in harmless situations, witnesses eyes are automatically drawn to a weapon.

are memories static?

memories are not static (jelly analogy!). the status of memory may be altered between encoding and retrieval because of the passage of time, intervening knowledge/experience and misinformation.

every time you bring up a memory to mind it is not being played back, it is being reconstructed.

what did Hermann Ebbinghaus discover about memory?

through testing himself (locking himself in his house and trying to recall lots of random syllabals) he found the forgetting curve.

• a person is more likely to forget most information the day after, than gradually lose more info each day. tend to lose specific details in the first day.

can intervening knowledge/experience impact our memory?

Yes! life is understood backwards, but you must be lived forwards. Intervening knowledge can change your memories.

how did Betty K’s case get altered through intervening knowledge?

participants read a case about Betty K. either a day or a week later were told Betty K was a heterosexual or homosexual, or nothing. memory was then assessed.

• participants made more label consistent errors than label inconsistent errors (consistent, was to do with the intervening information homo/heterosexual)

what is hindsight bias?

involves revising the probability of an outcome after the fact. After knowing the outcome

intervening knowledge experience

participants listened to an argument between a couple, half of the participants were told that the couple had subsequently broken up. the other half were told that the women had been found dead, and the bf had been charged with murder.

• memory for conversation was assessed

• participants in the murder condition were more likely to accurately remember that the man had made threatening statements towards the girl.

• were also more likely to inaccurately recall that he had hit her and had threatened to harm her classmate (Davis et al, 2005)

what is the standard misinformation procedure?

event → mislead → interviewed

( people are exposed to the event → mislead on some aspect → interviewed to see if the incorrect info makes its way though).

e.g., watch red car in an accident, asked “how fast was the blue car going?” then later asked “was the car blue or red”.

sources of misinformation in the media

plane crashed into apartment buildings at night but there was no footage, media explained the cause and months later survey results pointed out that said residents had seen footage of the crash despite there not being any.

how can the media hinder investigations?

sometimes media will portray things in certain lights, distorting the witnesses memory.

why does co-witness discussion occur?

• many crimes involve more than one witness

• 86% of witnesses engage in co-witness discussions

• according to witnesses, the primary purpose of these discussions is to provide information.

-advantages: can prompt witness memory recalling forgotten info. reinforcing memory

-disadvantage: could contaminate individuals recollection. may lead to reports of commonalities.

what did Solomon Asch conclude about conformity?

concluded that people were willing to give the wrong answer for two reasons:

• Normative conformity; they did not want to stand out amongst others.

• informational conformity they started to believe that the others were correct.

when researching co-witness discussions what is the confederate paradigm?

you have a participant and a confederate, they watch the same video but the confederate lies about pieces of information. this means that they can always bring up the important information.

can misinformation through co-witness discussion affect crimes?

pairs of participants watched a video of a simulated crime, they each watched a slightly different video without knowing. Half the participants were allowed to discuss the video before being interviewed individually.

• Yes! 71% of the participants in the discussion condition reported items that they had not seem. none of the participants in the control condition reported items they had not seen.

what is illusory truth effect?

even the simple act of repeating a statement can increase the strength of one’s belief in its truth. the more you say something, the more you believe it to be true.

what are the possible mechanisms of misinformation?

option 1: the person merely reports the misinformation and knows so (normative influence).

option 2: the original memory gets changed (have memory for blue car, then misinformed, told it was red and now they remember a red car)

option 3: there are now two memories, but the original one becomes less accessible or the person can’t distinguish between the two.

option 4: there was no original memory (no encoding)

how can we distinguish between whether the correct information is just less accessible or hasn’t been encoded?

Instead of presenting participants with a choice between the correct item and the misinformation item, these researchers presented them with a choice between the correct item and a novel item. At the end the misinformation is not there.

• If the original information was not encoded we should get 50:50 of the two options.

• If the original memory was still there, we would get more of that, proving the accessibility theory.

Can alcohol influence peoples vulnerability to misinformation?

participants drank a tonic water beverage, but half were told it was alcohol.
Participants then took part in the standard misinformation procedure.

Participants in the alcohol group were more susceptible to misleading post event info
But encoding did not differ between the two groups.

• Drunk = less correct, more susceptible to misinformation.

Under what conditions are people particularly susceptible to the negative impact of misinformation?

When it is introduced after a long passage of time, allowing the original memory to fade. This is because the likelihood of a discrepancy being noticed is a lot less. People are more likely to to change if a person does not immediately detect discrepancies between misinformation and memory for the original event.

Are some types of people particularly susceptible to misinformation?

Age matters, younger children are the most susceptible to misinformation, as well as elderly people. These may highlight the impact of cognitive resources.
Personality traits like empathy, absorption and self monitoring have showing higher rates too.
People who believe that their memory is bad, that they often have memory lapses, my not rely on their memory and listen to others as they do not trust themself.

How far can you go with people in terms of the misinformation you can plant in memory?

You can go as far as planting a whole new memory in, if it is from a long time ago. After the initial implantation, weeks later the participant tend to come up with a more elaborative story, which is entirely wrong.

What is the spreading activation of memory?

Information is encoded into units (small chucks/units). the units form interconnected network. The strength of these units increase with practice and decays with delay. Thus over time the units which are not rehearsed fade away.

What happens when you see more than one cognitive units of memory?

you have heaps of activation come back to you. The memory comes back quicker and stronger. e.g., if you saw a couch, fire and campus watch, a strong memory of St Patty’s could arise.

What happens if you see a cognitive unit that is no longer connected to the memory?

If you saw campus watch and you do not have a unit related to campus watch anymore on St Patty’s day. There will be no activation, therefore no spreading of activation.

What is the determinants of retrieval?

Retrieval is a joint product of:
- Stored memory traces
- cues that are available at retrieval.

Encoding specificity principal: to the extent that encoding conditions and retrieval conditions are similar, memory will be enhanced. (similar conditions to the encoding system, your memory is going to be better) Thus, context plays a larger role in retrieval

investigators influence on memory

-encoding (no impact as they weren’t there when it took place)

-storage (little to no impact)

-retrieval of memory (can impact as they are providing cues of retrieval)

what are the important aims of interviewing?

Maximising the quality and quantity of the information retrieved. Some techniques yield large amounts of not as strong info and some techniques yield small amount of strong info.

what is the strongest form of interview questions?

open-ended questions. do no suggest much to witnesses

what is the second strongest form of interview questions?

specific questions. do allow the interviewer to narrow the answer, crucial for specific details.

what is the third strongest form of interview questions?

forced choice questions; giving you some options, can suggest some information to the witness limiting their options.

what is one of the lowest type of interview questions?

suggestive questions. forced the witness to just accept or reject the interviewers question

what is the worst type of interview questions?

leading questions, no longer about memory and is more about social power.

what is the funneling technique used in interviews?

interviews should start of with a prolonged “free recall'“ phase, allowing witnesses to recall as much as they can remember. then if they ask specific questions they must them go back to open-ended questions to re-open the interview.

disadvantages is that interviewers find it hard to not interrupt witness

How does manipulating the interview question affect the witnesses memory?

subjects viewed film of car accident were then asked about it straight afterwards.
Manipulation: "how fast were the cars going when they XXX into each other?" Contracted → smashed.
The verb which was changed had a large effect of the speed which participants estimated the cars were going.

Can one leading question affect later questions?

Yes! participants were further asked if there was glass at the scene (which there wasn't).
Reporting of broken glass was related to the wording of the speed estimate question.

Can a single word change the answer to a question?

Yes! As little as a word change of 'a' to 'the' (did you see (a/the) broken headlight?)

What are the concerns with interviewing children?

report very little free recall and can be highly suggestible

what do anatomically detailed dolls require children to do?

• understand dual representation (have to understand that it is a doll, but it represents them)

• Map past events onto dolls (remember something that has happened to you and map it on the doll)

• Stay on task without drifting into play (dolls are associated with play, so it is weird that they can't play with the toy)

Do the dolls increase children's accuracy?

-Children suspected of abuse engage in more play and reported more fantastic details when interviewed with dolls that when interviewed without
- In the lab, dolls lead to increases in false reports of genital and anal touching, and exaggeration of innocuous touching. (children had to undergo a medial procedure, the children exaggerated the touching (more aggression)
- Dolls tend to increase errors without necessarily leading to an increase in detail.

What did research conclude about the dolls?

- Children interactions with dolls are not diagnostic of abuse.
- Interviewers should not use dolls in ways that ask children to demonstrate abuse prior to verbal reports of abuse.
- Dolls are especially risky with children under 5 years of age. (hard cognitively for them)

what are the advantages of visual aids?

• increase the proportion of accurate information provided

• may help with the social barrier between interviewer and interviewee

• putting themselves mentally back at the scene (retrieval conditions should be as similar as possible)

• help interviewers interrupt less

What is the tripartite model of rapport?

- Mutual attentiveness (focused interactions involvement, and mutual interest)
- Positivity (mutual friendliness, caring and positive affect)
- Coordination (balance, fluency of interaction and shared understanding)

What is interviewer objectivity?

When interviewers are not objective, they can:
- Shape witness reports (suggest certain things)
- Overlook or ignore relevant info (overlook responsible explanations, confirmation bias)
- Inaccurately report interview contents (statement does not write it to match what they said)

How did the McMartin preschool case go wrong?

Interview conducted: continuously interviewing until kids disclosed info. suggestive questions.

what are the problems with discussing other people in interviews?

telling the children that the interviewer has already received info from another person regarding the topics of the interview. It creates the pressure to conform.

Problems with negative and positive consequences in interviewing?

Consists of giving, promising or implying praise, arrival, agreement or other rewards to a child or indicated that the child will demonstrate desirable qualities. Negative consequences consists of critiquing or disagreeing with a child's statement or other wise indicating that the statement is incomplete, inadequate or disappointing.

Problems of asked and answered questions in interviews?

consists of asking the child a question that they have already unambiguously answered in the immediately preceding portion of the interview. Children will tend to change their answers as they believe the the interviewer is suggesting they are wrong.

Problems with inviting speculations in interviews?

asking the child to offer opinion or speculations about the past events, or framing the child's task during the interview as using imagination or solving a mystery. It might elicit speculations from children on the basis of what they have heard from other sources, rather than on what they have personally observed.

How does false IDs occur?

• Encoding (estimator variables)

• Storage (Estimator variables)
  The persons ability to remember the memory. The court can't do anything about it
  

• Retrieval (system variables)
  How your system processes it, the court system can affect this.

What are estimator variables?

sometimes people just don't have a very good recollection of the perpetrator's appearance, due to a range of different variables.

What are stable witness factors?

factors such as age and ethnicity

What are malleable witness factors?

Factors like alcohol consumption, tiredness
these do change day to day. e.g., if we are drunk we lose the ability to judge someone’s face as well.

What are stable target factors?

Factors like facial distinctiveness always going to be the same. if you are distinctive, people will remember you.

What are malleable target factors?

Factors like disguises, changes in appearance between the event and the recognition test. e.g., changing facial hair or getting a hair cut.

What features do people who describe someone tend to say?

Hairstyle: 27% (easiest to change)
Eyes: 14%
Nose: 14%
Face shape: 13%
bottom three are more likely to stay stable.

what environmental factors could influence estimator variables?

light levels, visibility, presence of a weapon (attention is narrowed to the weapon), crime seriousness (if you do not know the person committed the crime int he moment you might not pay attention).

What post event factors could effect estimator variables?

delay, exposure to misinformation (seeing a picture of potential subjects in media, could blend you memory with it), verbal overshadowing (if you describe someone, then go to a line up you do worse)

What are system variables?

things that the criminal justice system has control over. how they might elicit evidence from a witness. interviewing at the scene, asking what they look like, getting witness to come up with visual likeness, mugshot books and lineups.

what are the problems with verbal descriptions?

Often too brief to be forensically useful (tend to be vague)
Often focus on external features and other features that are easily changed (e.g., hairstyle, clothes)

What are the two problems with mugshot books?

1. They can easily contaminate subsequent identification performance (pick someone, then they are in line up, don't know if it is familiar or from book for from crime)

2. The knowledge that the photos are all known offenders can decrease identification threshold. more likely to pick someone as you know that they have all done bad things

What is a target present line up?

Suspect is the person who actually committed them crime (not known when the line up is presented, just highly suspected).

Correct response: you pick them out.

What is a target absent line up?

the suspect is actually an innocent person, but the police think it was them who committed the crime.
Everyone is innocent in the line up.
Correct response: you reject the line up/no one is the person.

Concerns with target absent lineups?

If you pick the suspect as the person who you think did it (but they are innocent) they could has some serious implication put on them.

What is an instruction bias?

Despite the police telling witnesses that they may or may not have the right person, and you can reject the line up. Target absent lineups lead to an increase in false alarms as people do not want to reject lineups.

In instruction biases, do people remember the instructions?

Yes, they are even able to recall them, but they choose to not consider them.
people still tend to pick the person on similarity to other foils (=relative judgement)

What is relative judgement in instruction bias?

Line ups tend to be picked on similarity to other foils. Find the person you find the most like the person in your memory. We choice the best of of them , instead of rejecting the line up if we can't see the correct person.

what are simultaneous lineups?

present all lineup members at the same time to the witness. relative judgement is used here.

what are sequential line ups?

Where the photos are presented one at a time. But you can't tell them how many photos there will be, and you have to stop as soon as they identify someone.
Absolute judgement is used here.

advantages; they result in fewer identifications overall, and fewer false alarms.

what are the benefits of sequential line ups?

they result in fewer identifications overall, and fewer false alarms

what are foil biases?

the bias that occur with how we choose the foils for the lineup

why do foil biases matter?

foils that are too dissimilar to the suspect may increase the chances of an innocent suspect being wrongly identified. foils that are too similar will confuse the witness and increase the chances of an innocent foil being identified.

curry analogy

think of your favourite dish, you could pick it out from an array of dishes but when asked what ingredients are in it you could not recall the exact ingredients/details.

What constitutes optimal similarity?

1. Similarity to the witness's verbal description? (all fit what you say as a witness, need a different one for each witness)
2. Similarity to the suspect? (choose person who look like the suspect)