midterm

Question 1

3 events that led to the formulation of Legal Psychology:

Answer 1

• Hugo Munsterberg 1906: Wrote a book about using psychology science on improving jury and judges’ decision making
• Brandeis Brief 1907: Opened the door for social science to be used in legal context
• Brown v. Board 1954: cited social science in their arguments. Opened door for more social scientist to provide insight.

Question 2

What are the two pathways to influence the legal system?

Answer 2

Expert Witness: value to jurors decided by judge

Amicus Briefs

Question 3

Daubert safeguard

Answer 3

o Guidelines to assess scientific validity
o Testability of theory/technique
o Science has been peer-reviewed
o Known error rate
o Generally, acceptance of conclusion by the scientific community
 The rules of expert were set by the judge, experts witness cannot take away the job of jury away. They cannot rely just on what the expert said.

Question 4

Is Daubert a good safe guard

Answer 4

Studies have found that judges: do not know what good science is, do not possess scientific literacy required, most do not know meaning of “error rate”-

Question 5

Reid & Associates Claims

Answer 5

false confessions are “rare” and 99.6% of confessions are true and correct

Question 6

Innocence project

Answer 6

False confessions are not a rare phenomenon.

Data suggest that this is not a rare phenomena at all and the consequences are detrimental to those confessing.
Average interrogation length, average = 16.4 hours

Question 7

Drizen and Leo

Answer 7

documented 125 proven false confessions
81% of those going to trial were convicted based on false confession evidence. Most retract their confession because they are away from circumstance

Question 8

Psychological research on interrogations & confessions

Answer 8

1) interrogations are coercive by nature
2) modern techniques can lead innocent people to falsely confess
3) some individuals are particularly susceptible to these techniques
4) juries fail to sufficiently weight situational factors & discount evidence of coercion

Question 9

“Reid” Technique

Answer 9

Most influential technique in police approach today

There is an important distinct between the pre-interrogation interview and the interrogation.

Question 10

Interrogation Conditions

Answer 10

Isolation (remove from familiar)
Confrontation: affirm guilt (evidence plays real/fabricated)
Exculpatory Scenarios (excuses) promising leniency for a confession is illegal (implicit or explicit)
Minimization/maximization tactics

Question 11

Memory

Answer 11

is constructive you take pieces of events and later you put it back together (filled in but does not look the same)

Question 12

Reasons for poor original memory

Answer 12

Environmental factors
Cross-racial factors
stress/fear
attention to assailants/appearance
fatigue
darkness

Question 13

Environmental (poor original memory)

Answer 13

Lighting:
Day: phototropic operates in normal well lit conditions
Night: Scotopic operates under conditions of dim illumination cant resolve fine detail, cant see color

Question 14

Event duration
Frequency
Distance

Answer 14

people often over estimate duration of event.
frequency doesn’t compensate for poor lighting
Distance: longer = poor ability to see

Question 15

Reasons for a Poor Original Memory: Witness

Answer 15

Stress:
Expectations: a type of schema that we have about the world operates physiological component.
Perception is partly determined by expectation

Question 16

Weapon Focus effect

Answer 16

: victims’ eyes will be focused on eyes. Attention grabbing details. Not just in terms of weapon, can be numerous things that are attention grabbing. We have limited attention span, visual field and auditory. The things that are unexpected will be accurate.

Question 17

Alcohol

Answer 17

In general, alcohol interferes with encoding and storing (so the theory says) Alcohol effects the hippocampus where the main pieces of information come to stored.

Question 18

Complex relationship/alcohol

Answer 18

alcohol myopia is the idea that when you are intoxicated what happens is that feeling of things not being clear they focus on salient things

Question 19

Age

Answer 19

In general, when looking at groups of people and statically remove everything else; younger children and older adults are less accurate, more error prone and more suggestible

Question 20

Cross-Race identification

Answer 20

Most of us have greater difficulty identifying members of other races than same-race members = They all look alike phenomenon

Question 21

4 rules for eyewitness identification

Answer 21

blind lineup administrators
bias reducing instructions to eyewitnesses
unbiased lineups
confidence ratings