Untitled Flashcards Set

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

Courts

• 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 

History of Forensic Psychology

• 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

• 1970s: 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

• Ph.D. in 1885

• Student of Wilhelm Wundt

  • Founder of experimental psychology

• 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

Basic v Applied Psychology

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

• Munsterberg: psychology should be applied to practical concerns (legal setting)

Let go of natural lines of thinking

• Don’t think that the fingerprint match is conclusive - FALSE RESULTS

Tests

• Don’t know if applying to guilty/ innocent

• 100% guilty people said guilty

• Don’t know how many innocent people were marked as guilty 

Interrogation vs Interview

• 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) 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) 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

• 80% waive their Miranda rights and are subject to interrogation 

• More than 90% juveniles waive their rights

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

• Simple study, asking mock jurors to see if people are guilty based on three conditions

• Mock jurors read trial testimony of defendant’s confession, little evidence of committing the crime & confession in 2 conditions

• Low-Pressure Interrogation- without being pushed

  • 60 - thought to be guilty

• High-Pressure Interrogation- tactics used

  • 50 - thought to be guilty

• No Confession

  • 20 - baseline

• Takeaway: 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

Experimental Study of False Confessions

• Introduces more way of how to think, hard insight about how to think about tests

• Hard to convince people they are not thinking in the right way

• Subject & confederate

  • Work alone on some 

  • Work together on some

• Guilty condition

  • Confederate sought to help on an individual problem (violate experimental rules) 

• Innocent condition

  • Confederate did not make this request to violate experimental rules

• Experimenter “discovered” similarities between solutions

  • Separated subject and confederate → accused both of cheating

  • Tactic: 

    • Admission by promising leniency, making minimizing remarks, both, or no tactics

    • “It’s not a big deal, everyone cheats”

• Which condition is best?

  • Value of judgment

  • You don’t know enough yet to try to answer that question

  • Diagnosticity ratio

• Both rates go up

Conceptualizing Results

• Some degree of confidence that they are guilty (continuous scale ranging from positive not guilty → → → positive guilty)

• On average, confidence of guilt is higher for guilty people

• Experiment simply manipulate the cognitive decision-making about whether or not to confess (manipulates the cost/benefit analysis)