PSYC 372 Exam #1

How expertise of psychologists may be used in the legal system

• Evaluators

  • eval programs and practice

  • conduct clinical evals of defendants

• Advisors

  • trial consultants

  • expert witnesses about research findings

• Reformers

  • Advocate for change in legal system based on research

Relevance of the Brandeis brief in Muller v. Oregon (1908) to psychology and law history

• opened the door for social science in the courts

• precedence for evidence based law

• seen in brown v. board.

Brown v. board of education (1954)

• held that racial segregation of kids in public schools was unconstitutional

• First case to make explicit use of research provided by social scientists (doll study)

Legal realism movement (1920-30)

• traditional view —> rule is fixed, stealing = 1 year in prison

• Legal realist —> rule is context sensitive: stealing food to survive might deserve a lesser sentence because the circumstance matter.

Differences in cultures and goals in science and law (LAW)

• Law

  • Proscribes how people should behave

  • Punishes illegal behavior

  • Avoids uncertainty

  • Focus on individuals

  • High deference to authority, hierarchical

  • Relies on past ruling and precedent

Differences in cultures and goals in science and law (SCIENCE/PSYCH)

• Describes how people do behave

• Investigates why people engage in behaviors

• Accepts uncertainty —> probabilistic conclusions

• Focus on groups and patterns

• Accepts data from all levels of researchers

• theories change dynamically with new data

Legal Precedents - Roles played by psychologists in the legal system (forensic psychologists)

• specialized forensic training or experience

• expertise at the intersection of psychology and law

• often certifications or professional affiliation

Evaluations of interventions like Scared straight and boot camps

• program eval is a systematic method for collecting, analyzing, and using info to answer questions about projects, policies, and programs

  • Flickenaur (1982) assigned youth to:

    • no treatment control

    • Scared straight program at Rahway prison

    • Six month follow up - treatment group substantially more likely to be rearrested

    • 2003 meta analysis showed these treatments backfired: boosting odds of offending by 60 to 70%

Why dont bootcamps/scared straight work?

• Effective punishment must be swift, certain, and moderately severe. these programs are uncertain and too severe.

• Peer contagion

• Prisoners can become role models

• Adding trauma to trauma

Expert Testimony (Daubert’s impact; roles that expert witnesses might take)

• Judges must assess scientific validity

• Appellate courts can review trial court decisions on expert testimony

• Daubert applies to all expert testimony, not just scientific

  • Science presented:

    • must be testable

    • must be peer reviewed

    • must have a known rate of error

    • generally accepted by the scientific community

Expert testimony case example: Jodi Arias/Dr. Samuels

• Dr. Samuels testified for the defense, alleging PTSD and memory loss

• Once an expert is designated as a testifying witness, discover rules require disclosure of all facts or data considered favorable or not.

Amicus Curiae Briefs

• A way for external parties to provide input and influence in a case

Pervasiveness of lying

• Deception common in social interaction

• Feldman 2002, 605 lied at least once during a 10 min conversation and told an average of two to three lies

• People lied more when they were given the goal to appear likeable or competent

• Gender: women were more likely to lie to make the person they were talking to feel good, while men lied to make themselves look better.

Machiavellian hypothesis of lying

• Machiavellianism - a personality trait in which a person is so focused on their own interests they will manipulate, deceive, and exploit others to achieve their goals.

• Deceptiveness in other species suggests an evolutionary advantage of deception

  • common in animal world, mostly in species that cooperate (primates)

Accuracy in lie detection

• Overall - 54%

• Criminals - 65.40%

• Students - 54.20%

• Detectives - 51.16%

Effects of Interrogation training videos on lie detection accuracy

• Explaining detectives poor lie detection peroformance

• Training leads to confidence

• But training based on mistaken “liars stereotype”

Types of errors in lie detection

• true positive - a guilty person is correctly classified as guilty after lying (hit)

• True negative - an innocent person is correctly classified as innocent after telling the truth (hit)

• False positive - an innocent person is misclassified as guilty after telling the truth (miss)

• False negative - a guilty person is misclassified as innocent after lying (miss)

Basic theory behind the polygraph

• based on the assumption that physiological arousal = lying

• First polygraph developed by William Marston (1915)

  • Blood pressure

The Comparison question test (CQT)

• Have you ever tried to get someone else in trouble?

• Did you kill your husband?

  • Pretest interview

  • examinee attached to the instruments

  • Examiner alternates control questions with crime relevant ones.

Guilty knowledge test (GKT)

• Premise is guilty person will recognize crime info that innocent person does not; elevated physiological arousal occurs

• Most promising polygraph-based technique studied

  • Ex. $1000 is the key info therefore a guilty person will show an arousal spike at the mention of this item

• Limitations

  • enough crime facts must be available

  • details must be recalled by the guilty person

  • Facts must not be widely publicized

Legal Status of the Polygraph

• 23 states, federal, and military courts do not allow the use of polygraph tests as evidence in criminal trials

  • allowed in other states under certain conditions (impeachment)

    • Ex.

      • Defendant testifies that I never siad i was at the scene of the crime

      • but earlier during a police interview, they failed a polygraph where they answered yes to the question, were you at the scene?

  • The prosecution might try to use the polygraph failure to impeach that testimony.

Polygraph impact prior to trial

• Investigative tool

• To pressure suspects during interrogation

• Guide charging decision

• Influence plea deals

Techniques for accuracy in lie detection

• Cognitive load strategies:

  • Lying require extra cog effort

  • Increasing cog load during interviews amplifies behavioral differences

  • Liars show more signs of overload than truth tellers under added cognitive pressure.

    • Strats to increase cog effort

      • reverse storytelling

      • insisting on eye contact

      • asking for spatial info through drawing

    • Brain based lie detection

      • fmri

      • EEG

Jurors perceptions of confessions

• research shows that jurors do not adequately discount confession, even if the confessions were coerced.

  • Mock jurors read transcripts involving no confession, a low-pressure confession, or a high pressure confession.

  • Mock jurors reported that they disregarded the involuntary confession, however, their verdicts indicated otherwise:

    • Low pressure - 62%

    • high pressure - 50%

    • no confession - 19% found the defendant guilty.

The Wickersham Report

• Prior to 1930: direct physical violence (third degree)

• 1931 Wickersham report: reduced overt abuse, but covert abuse (no marks) continued

Miranda Rights

• to remain silent

• to have an attorney present during questioning

• to acknowledge understanding of rights

  • 80% of suspects waive rights and are subject to interrogation

    • police delivery - may be rusehd or ritualistic

    • suspect factors: under stress, lack clear thinking, or unable to understand that rights are being waived

    • innocent people believe they have nothing to hide

Reid Technique of interrogation

• Fact analysis

• pre interview/behavioral analysis

• Reid nine steps of interrogation (when appropriate)

  • Loss of control

  • social isolation

  • certainty of guilt

  • minimization of culpability

Reid Nine steps:

1. confrontation

2. theme development

3. stopping denials

4. overcoming objections

5. regaining attention and building rapport

6. signs of surrender

7. presenting an alternative

8. eliciting the confession

9. documenting the confession

   1. can pressure people into false confessions

Suspect vulnerabilities to making a false confession

• personal factors

  • youth (most vulnerable)

  • stress, anxiety, fatigue

  • low IQ

  • interpersonal trust

  • suggestibility; compliance

  • alcohol/drug use

The Central Park Five Case

• Trish Meili found in Central Park, lost 80% of her blood, physicians testified that she onto life by a thread, unable to remember the attack at all.

• False confession of 5 young boys of color - they were coerced into false confessions in order to escape the agonizing interrogation

• Exoneration - in 2002 matias reyes confessed, his DNA was found on Meili’s sock, convictions against the central park five overturned, 41 million settlement.

Accusatorial vs. informational methods

• informational methods used over accusatorial to reduce false confessions.

• ex. the PEACE method (non coercive and used in UK and Canada)

  • Does not reduce true confession but does reduce false ones

    • Video- recorded confessions also help however they can be skewed with angles or partial recordings

Four types of false confessions

• instrumental coerced - falsely confesses under extreme pressure (Central Park Five)

• Instrumental voluntary - falsely confesses to achieve some goal

• Internalized coerced - suspect coerced into believing that they may have actually committed the crime (little boy convinced he had an alternate version of himself that killed his little sister)

• Internalized voluntary - someone suffering from delusions confesses to a crime without pressure from interrogations

recent legislation regarding deception in interrogation

• PACE act made it generally illegal for police officers to use deceptive tactics during interrogations in England and Wales

• Illinois (2021) became the first state to ban police from lying to minors during criminal interrogations

Which of the following would not be a suitable comparison question in CQT

Have you ever tried a food you didn’t like?

Police detectives were ___ likely than college students to judge false confessions as true, and were ____ confident about their judgements

more; more

A defendant is caught stealing food from a grocery store, they were unemployed and trying to feed their starving children, which judicial approach aligns most closely with the legal realism movement of the 1920s-30s

consider the defendant’s social and economic circumstances as mitigating factors when determining the sentence.

According to Zimmerman 2016, which of the following strats has been found to increase deception detection accuracy above chance levels?

withholding evidence until later in the interview

Danny was very uncomfy with admitting to a crime against a minor, the investigator was patient and suggested that Danny probably thought she was an adult. This situation illustrates which influence strat in Reid technique?

minimization of culpability