my psyc 162 midterm 1

Forensic Psychology

Application of methods, theories, and concepts from the field of experimental psychology to a wide variety of topics in the legal system

Forensic Scientists is DIFFERENT

• Analyze physical evidence left behind by an unknown suspect (unsub)

  • DNA

  • Latent prints

  • Bite marks, ballistics, fibers, toolmarks

• Link evidence to specific suspects

Family Court

• Child custody/ child abuse evaluations

• Mediation of parental conflicts about children

Civil Court

• Personal injury evaluations

• Sexual harassment & discrimination

Criminal Court - the focus of this class

• Competency & insanity evaluations

• False confessions

• Eyewitness identification

• Predicting violent behavior

1976 - 2008

• War on drugs, increased prison population

• Mass incarceration

• 1-1.5 million people are in prison

• There’s a difference between jail and prison

  • 2 million convicts between the two presently

Wrongful Conviction:

The Innocence Project

1992

 DNA testing exonerated hundreds of innocent people who were wrongfully convicted

1989

• FIRST DNA EXONERATION

• 375 innocent prisoners exonerated

  • Average of 14 years before being exonerated

Death Row

• 1973 -2004

• Almost 7500 people

• 12.6% executed 943

• 46% death row

• 35.8% removed from death row (not executed)

• 1.6% exonerated by DNA evidence

  • 4.1% might be innocent at sentencing

1843

Daniel M’Naughten found not guilty by reason of insanity

1908

• Hugo Munsterberg's On the Witness Stand is published

  • BIG FOR FIELD TODAY

1922  William Marston (a student of Munsterberg)

appointed first professor of legal psychology in the US; invented the lie detector test

1970 Elizabeth Loftus

began to demonstrate how easy it can be to implant false memories

1990s: The Innocence Project

used DNA testing to reveal that an unexpected number of innocent people had been wrongfully convicted

2001:

The American Psychological Association formally recognizes the forensic psychology as a specialty discipline

Hugo Munsterberg

• Chapter 1 - Illusions

  • Eyewitness memory is fallible

• Chapter 2 - The Memory of the Witness

  • Experimental psychologist as expert witness

• Chapter 3 - The Detection of Crime

  • Guilty Knowledge Test

• Chapter 5 - Untrue Confessions

  • False Confessions

• Chapter 6 - Suggestions in Court

  • Memory can be contaminated by suggestive questioning

Wundt:

 psychology should be a pure (basic) science, removed from practical concerns

Munsterberg

psychology should be applied to practical concerns (legal setting)

Don’t think that the fingerprint match is conclusive

FALSE RESULTS

Interrogation

• Subject is a SUSPECT of committing the crime

• Goals:

  • Est if suspect is perpetrator (CONFESSION)

  • Get accurate information to facilitate investigation

Witnesses - (at risk population: children & mentally ill) (interrogation)

 might confess to a crime they didn’t commit - false confession

Custodial interrogation

• Freedom of movement is restricted

• Definition: a reasonable person would have felt like they were not free to leave/ end interrogation

Interview

• Subject is a witness to crime (victim/ bystander)

• Goal:

  • Get accurate information to help the investigation

Witnesses (at risk population: children) (interview)

• can provide false information

  • Leads to innocent people getting convicted

Miranda Rights (Miranda v. Arizona 1966)

• Used in custodial interrogation

• 4 parts to the Miranda Rights:

  • Whatever you say can and will be used against you in the court of law

  • You have the right to an attorney 

  • If you cannot afford an attorney one will be appointed to you

  • Do you understand your rights as I have read them?

• Goal:

  • Discourage police from coercion, lower percent of false confessions

Innocent people often waive their right to “prove” innocence

• Waived rights → innocent suspect → false confession

  • Due to coercion

Police Interrogation Tactics

• Isolate

• Pretend to have evidence of guilt

• Fake: false lie detector test, murder weapon finger prints

• Drinking → fuzzy memory, might have committed the crime

• Innocent people can confess, if they are not 100% sure they didn’t commit the crime

Power of Confession

Confessions are impactful and jurors take note and send people to prison

Fundamental attribution error:

• Tendency to OVERemphasize dispositional facts (guilty) while MINImizing situational factors (coercion) to explain an individual’s behavior (confession)

• Prone to ignore citation and explain behavior based on the person being guilty

Jurors interpret a confession as a reflection of actual guilt, discounting coercion

• Impossible to get someone out of prison if they have confessed 

• Hugo Munsterberg was first psychologist to write about false confession

No: All-or-None Thinking

• Emphasis: on continuous thinking

• Fingerprint match to some degree → apply same thinking to confessions

Coerced- Instrumental

end interrogation by confession

Voluntary - Instrumental

protect someone else/ gain popularity

Coerced - Authentic

confessor becomes persuaded that they are guilty

Voluntary - Authentic

confessor is delusional or mentally ill

Instrumenal

to achieve a goal

Authentic

they really believe it

2006 John Mark Karr confessed to killing JonBenet Ramsey

• Became obsessed with details of her murder and was extradited from Thailand

• He was home at the time or murder and his story didn’t match the crime

Voluntary Authentic - delusional or mentally ill

 1973 Peter Reilly

• Mother was found dead in their home

• Police told him he failed the polygraph, after 8 hours of interrogation, he confessed

  • Police officer & machine vs. man

• 3 years in prison before there was evidence that it was someone else

  Coerced Authentic

1998 Michael Crowe

• Confessed to the murder of his little sister

  • Two days of intense questioning → admitted to killing Stephanie

  • “Only saying this because it’s what you want to hear”

  • Charges dropped after DNA was linked to someone else

    • Settlement for emotional damage

      Coerced-Instrumental

Admissibility of Confession

• Must be given voluntarily

• Must be given by a person who is competent

• NOT ALLOWED: confessions that are obtained by overtly coercive tactics (denying food)

Ban “false evidence ploy”

• Illinois & Oregon: recently banned use of police deception in interrogation against juveniles

• Tactics still used against adults in all 50 states

Special protections for vulnerable suspect populations

Juveniles & impaired people (psychologically disordered / cognitively impaired)

Bond & DePaulo (2006)

• A meta-analysis of 253 studies on deception revealed overall accuracy was approximately 53% people can’t tell lies 

Paul Ekman

• People fare only slightly better than a coin toss at detecting deception

• More famous for argument that faces show emotion and they’re universal

“Low Stakes” lies do not elicit emotion → lies are harder to detect

• Lying about liking coke/pepsi won’t do anything

• Can’t find any difference in facial expression

“High stakes” lies arouse emotions that create facial expressions that “leak through” attempts to mask them

• MICRO-EXPRESSIONS

• Lies that are important, generate internal turmoil

• Despite trying to look casual, small movement indicative of emotion

Facial Action Coding System - Ekman, Friesen & O’Sullivan (1988)

• Subtle facial movements associated with being happy occur more often in the truthful condition

• Subtle facial movements associated with negative emotions occurred more often in the lying condition

• Sees smaller versions based on if you are telling the truth or lying

Emotion Deception Judgement Task

• Confederate talks about watching nature video while watching upsetting video

• Confederate talks about watching a nature video while watching nature video

  • High stakes lie because lying condition is emotionally arousing and gruesome

Opinion Deception Judgment task

• Express an opinion (death penalty) that goes against your strong beliefs (lying)

• Express an opinion that agrees with your strong beliefs (telling truth)

Wizards of Lie Detection - O’Sullivan & Ekman (2004)

• 50 individuals (out of 20,000 screened) performed very well on all three high-stakes lie detection tests (opinions, mock crime, emotion)

• Concern → random chance, not because of being good at detecting lies 

• “Wizards” made the most of their special status

Wright Whelan, Wagstaff & Wheatcroft (2015)

• Real world liars in super high scenario

• Appealing for children when they have kidnapped but kids were actually killed

• Participants:

  • 70 police officers & 37 undergraduates

    • Police a little better than undergrads but pretty similar in lie differentiating ability

Encourage interviewee to say more

• (because liars tend to “weave a tangled web” the more they talk)

  • Person you’re interviewing engage in more mental computation - they’re more likely to mess up

William Moulton Marston (1893-1947)

• Student of Hugo Munsterberg at Harvard (IMPORTANT GUY)

• Discovered correlation between blood pressure and arousal during lying

• Invented Wonder Woman

John Augustus Larson

• Rookie police officer in Berkeley police department

• Ph.D. in physiology from UC

• Improved marston’s test though continuous recording of blood pressure

• First real world application

  • Money and expensive ring stolen in a sorority house 1921

  • Test

    • Calibration question - “Are you interested in math?”

    • “Did you steal the money?”

    • “The test shows you stole it. Did you spend it?”

  • Suspect

    • Helen Graham

    • Record showed a large change in blood pressure, skipped heart beats and a halt in her breathing

    • Was arrested but later convinced Larson she was innocent

Relevant/ Irrelevant Test - most problematic

• Baseline recordings

• Ask some irrelevant questions (“Are you interested in math?”

• Ask some relevant to the crime (“Did you steal the money?”)

• If the arousal of the relevant question is greater than the arousal for the irrelevant question then they are guilty of lying 

• Idea: physiological response higher in relevant question instead of irrelevant question → guilty

Comparison Question (control question) Test

• Add a probable-lie comparison question (“Have you ever stolen anything?”)

  • Make nervous person nervous even if it’s not on topic

  • Most people have stolen something at some point in their life

• If the arousal of the relevant question is greater than the arousal for the comparison then they  are guilty of lying

  • Looking for more arousal to the crime relevant question

Concealed Information (i.e. Guilty Knowledge) Test

• Present one true and several false details of an incident that has not been publicized, so the true answer would be known only to the perpetrator 

• Innocent suspects will not be more aroused in response to the true item, but guilty subjects will be

• If the arousal of true detail is greater than arousal of false details → guilty of lying

  • People tend to think this is the best, but can’t really tell

Comparison Question Test

• Comparison question to relevant question

• 0 → 3 scale

• Suspect is lying when summed score across 3 measures is 5 or more

• Continuous scale is amount of physiological scale that happens in waves 

• Information is not perfect

  • False alarm rate: 40, hit rate: 80

Guilty Knowledge Test Example

• Participants needed to steal a CD in a red case with exam answers on it

  • Then try to convince examiner they are innocent

• “Guilty knowledge” questions

  • Color of the CD

    • Blue, green, red, purple

  • Name of the TA

    • Name1, name2, name3, name4)

  • Subject of the exam

    • Antro, psych, bio, physics

  • Thought process: innocent person won’t have more physiological activity when crime details are mentioned

Many believe Polygraph is the worst for relevant-irrelevant method and best for the guilty knowledge method

Data suggests that all methods are equally effective

Polygraph might be lower in practice

• Much lower than ROC curves suggest

  • Tests that seem to work in the lab are not that good

  • Results range from low to high - subjective judgment call where to put criterion

Testing is undertaken soon after the crime

Limits forgetting or “emotional distancing”

COUNTERMEASURES

Biting one’s tongue - could be a problem for accuracy readings

Polygraph examiner’s preexisting knowledge of evidence against the suspect

• Can make biases of interpretation to lie-detection test

• Polygraph examiner might move criteria in response to information and be less/more likely to call someone guilty (influence of knowledge by other evidence)

Green River Killer - 1982

• Police decided he wasn’t guilty even when he was because they were too conservative on the lie detector test

• Got him because of DNA testing

• KNOW TO ACHIEVE A HIGHER ROC TO MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE

HIT RATE IS HIGHER THAN FALSE ALARM RATE

GOOD TEST

Base Rate Problem

• Number of innocent and guilty people are the same (100)

  • In screen there’s usually mostly innocent people

  • 5% of people in class would fail the polygraph test (15 people)

  • Every single guilty decision was a false alarm - didn’t test any guilty people

• Extreme imbalance between guilty and innocent people, all decisions are wrong even though false alarm rate is low and hit rate is high

“Probable cause” scenario

• A lot will be guilty a lot will be innocent

• Rough balance between groups

Screening test

Even a good test (high hit rate and low false alarm rate) will wrongly identify far more innocent people than guilty people

Polygraph results are sometimes admissible in court - up to the judge’s discretion

• Might be too valid in the brains of the jury, that a machine would tell innocence or not

• Confessions are very admissible in court & legal 

• Police can lie to suspects, you can’t lie about your confession

fMRI

• Detects “where” lying occurs in the brain 

• Does not measure physiological arousal - might be able to detect low-stakes lies

  • Concept is different

  • Cognitive lies that don’t arouse emotions, measuring brain activity brain is lying comparing to truth telling 

• Lies in the brain and eyes

  • Different areas of the brain tend to light up more when there was a low stakes lie than truth telling

  • Neural correlates of deception

    • Areas of brain that tend to light up when you lie

    • Anterior cingulate cortex (ACC)

• Results are noisy and not yet usable in the courtroom

  • Promise still remains of detecting cognitive lies, nowhere close yet

Just screening people - no reason to believe they are guilty

• Always testing way more innocent people

  • KNOWN FALSE ALARM RATE - number of people you incorrectly call guilty will be high

Accuracy could be low because you’re screening a lot of people who are not guilty

• ACCURACY WILL BE LOW 

• GIVEN THAT YOU CALLED SOMEONE GUILTY WHAT IS THE PROBABILITY THAT YOU'RE RIGHT

• hit/(hit + false alarms) - limited to high confidence

1906 Sigmund Freud:

Decisions influenced by unconscious processes

• 1908: 

On the Witness Stand- failed to mobilize research psychology

• Hugo Munsterberg, experimental psychologist

  • First to identify thriving areas of research

    • Witness memory, false confessions, & jury decision making

Muller v. Oregon workday of any woman

• Employed in a laundry/factory limited to 10 hours a day

• Reduced hours, improved wages & restricted child labor

• Opened the door in court for social scientific evidence

1920s-30s: Legal Realism Movement

• Against established order by natural law

  • Early example of influence of psychology on law

• 1927 American Bar Association

  • William James & John Dewey

• Pragmatism, induction, scientific approaches 

  • Laws need to be continuously updated

  • Law means to social ends not end itself

  • Law evaluated in terms of effects

May 1954 Brown v Board of Education

• Social science - law

• Explicit use of research provided by social scientists

• Inferiority affects development of children

1969 President Address - George Miller call to use

• Psychological way to solve society’s problems

• Social reforms 

  • “Scared Straight”:

    • Possible backfiring, boosts offs of offending 60-70%

• War of subjective impressions “seem right”/work

Expert Testimony

Called on to testify in court/ in front of legislative bodies

Falsifiability

• technique proven false/ unreliable via data collection

  • Peer review & rate of error, accepted conclusions

Daubert v Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals Inc (1993)

Clear impact: lawyers now file more motions to limit/ exclude testimony proposed by lawyer opponents

Gatekeepers:

•  Judges from scientific testimony

  • Responsible for evaluating research

  • Trial judge has authority/responsibility to evaluate

Probative

tending to support proposition

Prejudicial

 tending to favor preconceived ideas

Margaret Hagen: experimental psychologist

• Whores of the Court

• Virtually impossible to prosecute expert witness perjury

Amicus Curiae Briefs

• Friend of the court- educate judges

• Jury size, death penalty, gay nights, abortion

• Prediction of dangerous people, mentally ill, etc

Roper

 court banned death penalty for juveniles who commit capital murders

Miller

Court banned the sentence of mandatory life in prison without parole for juvenile murder

Juror belief although coercive confession does NOT lead to false confession

Info suspect confessed cause eyewitness change person ID culprit

Before 1930s, police beatings in confession/ interrogations

• Physical → psychological abuse

• Forms of abuse: deprivation, isolation, intimidation, with holding food, water, toilet

Since 1961, inadmissible if confession due to above mentioned forms of abuse

• 1966: Miranda v Arizona → Miranda Rights

  • 4 components, 80% waive their rights

Reid technique: 9 steps of interrogation

1. Loss of control: tightly controlled psychologically disorienting situation

2. Social isolation: no emotional support/ contradictory information

3. Certainty of guilt: direct accusation of crime/ evidence ploy

4. Minimization of crime/ fault: face saving justification/ excuse for the crime

   1. Shifting blame of suspect → someone else (circumstances)

   2. Intent: make situation less worse 

Social Influence (Cialdini)

• Authority: comply w/ request person in power

• Reciprocity: obligation to return favors

• Liking: “yes” to people they favor

• Scarcity: limited time offer

• Social Proof: gather information about what/ how others would behave

• Commitment & Consistency: more likely to do something if said

Thomas Sawyer false confession via evidence ploy

“Blackout” alcoholic episode → memory loss

PEACE: 5 stages of interrogation process

• P- preparation & planning: plan to guide the process

• E- engage & explain: suspect rapport & interrogation procedure

• A- account: information gathering - pointing things out

• C- closure: summarization of account → recall & disclosure

• E- evaluation: after interrogation- police performance

Lengthy interrogation → unfair → lead to more false confessions

• Higher fatigue → more false confessions

• Rare for competent interrogator to need more than 4 hours

• Expert testimony can talk about false confession data