Social Psychology and the Law

Social Psychology and the Law
Applied Module 3 Social Psychology and the Law © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

Eyewitness Testimony The Canadian legal system assigns a great deal of significance to eyewitness testimony. Eyewitness testimony has a far greater effect on jurors than it should, given that it is often inaccurate. Many cases of wrongful arrest and conviction are due to mistaken identification made by eyewitnesses. © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

Eyewitness Testimony Studies confirm that jurors rely heavily on evidence from eyewitness testimony when they’re deciding if someone is guilty (see Lindsay et al, 1981; Fig. SPA3.1). Jurors believe that witnesses can be accurate even when viewing conditions are poor. How accurate are eyewitnesses to real crimes? Not very. © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

Eyewitness Testimony Why Are Eyewitnesses Often Wrong? Why are eye witnesses often wrong? Because eyewitness is a form of social perception, and it is subject to all of the distortions therein, particularly that involving memory. © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

Eyewitness Testimony Why Are Eyewitnesses Often Wrong? In order for someone to be an accurate eyewitness, he/she must complete three stages of memory processing (see Fig. SPA3.2): acquisition, or noticing and attending to the information storage, or storing the information in memory retrieval, or recalling the information stored in their memories © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

Eyewitness Testimony Acquisition Acquisition of information is affected by many factors, including: Whether a witness is a victim, or a bystander, the latter being more accurate How much time there is to watch the event (usually very little) The nature of the viewing conditions (e.g., light, dark, obstruction) © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

Eyewitness Testimony Acquisition Whether a weapon was involved (witnesses tend to focus on a weapon) Expectations (e.g., what the witness expects to see) Emotional upset (e.g., fear) Race (witnesses are subject to their own-race bias). Greater familiarity. Own-race bias: people are better at recognizing faces of their own race than those of other races. © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

Eyewitness Testimony Storage Storage of information is subject to reconstructive memory. Reconstructive memory is the process whereby memories of an event become distorted by information encountered after the event has occurred. © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

Eyewitness Testimony Storage Loftus and colleagues have shown that misinformation provided to witnesses tends to be incorporated into their memories of the event and thereby distorts the true picture. The implication of these studies is that the way in which police and lawyers question witnesses can change the witnesses’ reports of what they saw. © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

Eyewitness Testimony Storage Misleading questions cause a problem with source monitoring. Source monitoring is the process whereby people try to identify the source of their memories. The implications for legal testimony are sobering. Eyewitnesses who are asked misleading questions often report seeing things that were not really there. © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

Eyewitness Testimony Retrieval There can be problems with how people retrieve information from their memories. Identifying the guilty person from a police lineup is a good example. Witnesses often choose the person in a lineup who most resembles the criminal, even if the resemblance is not strong. Errors are especially likely if the innocent person wears clothing similar to that worn by the guilty person. © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

Eyewitness Testimony Retrieval To avoid the problem of witnesses choosing the person who looks most like the suspect, psychologists recommend that police follow six steps: Make sure everyone in the lineup resembles the witness’s description of the suspect Tell the witnesses that the person suspected of the crime may or may not be in the lineup © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

Eyewitness Testimony Retrieval Do not always include the suspect in an initial lineup Present pictures of people sequentially instead of simultaneously Present witnesses with photographs of people and sound recordings of their voices Try to minimize the time between the crime and the identification of suspects © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

Eyewitness Testimony Judging Whether Eyewitnesses Are Mistaken: Does certainty mean Accuracy? Witness confidence is an important variable in determining whether or not he/she is believed. Studies consistently show that jurors are more likely to believe a witness who expresses confidence than one who does not. Unfortunately, confidence is not strongly related to accuracy of identification. © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

Eyewitness Testimony Judging Whether Eyewitnesses Are Mistaken: Does certainty mean Accuracy? It is therefore, dangerous to assume that because a witness appears very confident, he/she is correct (see Lindsay and colleagues, 1981; Fig. SPA3.1). © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

Eyewitness Testimony Judging Whether Eyewitnesses Are Mistaken: Signs of Accurate Testimony How can we tell whether a witness’s testimony is correct? It’s not easy, but paying attention to what they say is helpful (see Dunning & Stern,1994). Accurate witnesses tend to say that they didn’t really know how they recognized the man, that his face just ‘popped out’ at them. Inaccurate witnesses tend to say that they used a process of elimination whereby they deliberately compared one face to another. © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

Eyewitness Testimony Judging Whether Eyewitnesses Are Mistaken: The Problem of Verbalization What is it about this careful process of elimination, deliberately comparing one face to another, that leads to inaccurate identification? Engstler-Schooler (1990) suggests that it may have something to do with trying to put an image of a face into words that causes the problem. Putting a face into words is difficult and it impairs memory for that face. © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

Eyewitness Testimony Judging Whether Eyewitnesses Are Mistaken: The Problem of Verbalization Engstler-Schooler (1990) found that only 38% of the people in the verbalization condition correctly identified the fictitious robber, whereas 64% of the people in the no verbalization condition did so. © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

Eyewitness Testimony Judging Whether Eyewitnesses Are Lying Another reason eyewitnesses testimony may be inaccurate is that witnesses may deliberately lie. To what extent can we tell when people are lying? Not well. The problem is that people tend to think that there are reliable cues to deception, such as whether a person refuses to look at you in the eye. There are no such cues. © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

Eyewitness Testimony Judging Whether Eyewitnesses Are Lying One might expect that law enforcement officials, most of whom have spent years with suspects professing their innocence, would be best able to detect lying. But this is not the case. These people do no better than untrained university students in determining if someone is telling the truth or not (see DePaulo & Pfeiffer, 1986). © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

Eyewitness Testimony Judging Whether Eyewitnesses Are Lying: The Polygraph The polygraph is a machine that measures people’s physiological responses (e.g., heart rate). Polygraph operators attempt to tell if someone is lying by observing how the person responds physiologically while answering questions. The assumption is that when people lie they become anxious, and that this anxiety can be detected by increases in heart rate, breathing rate, etc. © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

Eyewitness Testimony Judging Whether Eyewitnesses Are Lying: The Polygraph How well does the polygraph detect when people are lying? Not well. It depends on the operator. Under optimal conditions with an experienced operator, the polygraph can tell whether someone is lying or telling the truth at levels better than chance. Otherwise, the polygraph results in no better than chance identification. © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

Eyewitness Testimony Judging Whether Eyewitnesses Are Lying: The Polygraph A review of studies estimates that the polygraph typically misidentifies about 15% of liars as truth-tellers (false negatives), and 15% of truth-tellers as liars (false positives) ( Ekman, 1992). Because of the rate of error, Canada does not allow the results of polygraph tests to be used in a court of law. © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

Eyewitness Testimony Can Eyewitness Testimony Be Improved? Given the importance of eyewitness testimony, is there any way it can be improved? Two general approaches have been tried, but neither has proven to be very successful to date: hypnosis cognitive interview © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

Eyewitness Testimony Can Eyewitness Testimony Be Improved? Hypnosis involves putting people into a trance-like state and asking them to recall events. Unfortunately, there is no hard evidence that people’s memories improve when they are hypnotized. © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

Eyewitness Testimony Can Eyewitness Testimony Be Improved? Moreover, there is evidence of detrimental effects: i) people under hypnosis are more susceptible to suggestion, believing that they saw things they did not ii) they become more confident in their memories after hypnosis even though they are no more accurate © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

Eyewitness Testimony Can Eyewitness Testimony Be Improved? The second way involves a cognitive interview. A cognitive interview is a technique whereby a trained interviewer tries to improve eyewitnesses’ memories by focusing their attention on the details and context of they event. This technique, too, is fraught with difficulties. In particular, it may increase errors and confabulations of memory, especially when used with children. © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

Eyewitness Testimony Can Eyewitness Testimony Be Improved? The Recovered Memory Debate Another form of eyewitness memory has received a great deal of attention, that of accuracy of recovered memories. Recovered memories are recollections of an event, such as sexual abuse, that had been forgotten or repressed. © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

Eyewitness Testimony Can Eyewitness Testimony Be Improved? The Recovered Memory Debate The problem with recovered memories is that it is very difficult to determine whether they are truth or fiction. There is evidence from numerous lab studies and from everyday life that people can acquire vivid memories of events that never actually occurred. Thus, other kinds of evidence is needed to support, or refute these claims. © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

Other Kinds of Evidence
There are a number of other kinds of evidence that police, judges, and juries can rely on in reaching decisions about the guilt or innocence of people accused of crimes. These include i) expert testimony, ii) physical evidence, and iii) statistical evidence. Juries find some of these kinds of evidence more persuasive than others. © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

Expert Testimony There are difficulties surrounding the use of expert testimony in court. One problem is that jurors may not always understand judges’ instructions about the kinds of evidence that are permissible from an expert witness. And yet, it is important that jurors know how to properly evaluate expert testimony because research shows that jurors are influenced by such information (see Schuller & Hastings, 1996). © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

Expert Testimony In Canada, the courts have tended to move away from expert testimony. Why? Because, Some judges believe that much of what experts have to offer is common sense__especially psychological experts. Other judges are concerned that jurors will rely too heavily on what experts say, rather than critically evaluate information themselves. © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

Expert Testimony Still other judges agree that expert testimony does have a place in Canadian courts, providing certain guidelines are followed (eg, experts must be independent and objective). © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

Physical Evidence Physical evidence such as footprints, fingerprints, samples of hair, or fibres, DNA, inconsistencies in time and place, are all used to persuade jurors to convict, or to declare innocence. DNA testing has become much more accurate in recent years, and is the preferred choice in many cases, although the results are not always believed by jurors (e.g., O.J. Simpson case). Other kinds of physical evidence tend not to be as persuasive as DNA, or as eye-witness testimony. © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

Statistical Evidence Statistical evidence refers to information on the probability that the accused committed the crime. Generally, people do not find physical or statistical evidence convincing. Rather, it seems that when considering different kinds of evidence, juries and judges tend to be persuaded by the kind of evidence that is most unreliable__ eyewitness testimony. © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

Juries: Group Processes in Action
The jury tradition is longstanding in English and North American law and is not about to be abolished. © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

Still, the jury system has often come under attack: for wrongful convictions for inability to understand complex evidence (eg, studies show that participants acting as mock jurors understood just over 60% of what they had been told). for logical reasons—why should we think “that 12 persons brought in from the street, selected in various ways for their lack of general ability, have any special capacity to decide controversies between persons?” © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

The jury system is not perfect. Problems can arise at each of three phases of a jury trial: the way in which jurors use information they obtain before the trial begins the way in which they process information during the trial the way in which they deliberate in the jury room © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

Effects of Pretrial Publicity Jurors are sometimes biased by pretrial publicity, even when they consciously try not to be. The information they receive from the media is clearly incomplete, sometimes inaccurate, and often biased in the direction of guilty, because most of it comes from the police and the Crown prosecutor, who have a vested interest in presenting a strong case against the suspect. © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

Effects of Pretrial Publicity Emotional publicity that arouses public passions, such as lurid details about a murder, is the most biasing. Kramer et al (1990) showed that emotional publicity biased jurors the most, significantly increasing the percentage of jurors who gave guilty verdicts__even though the jurors knew they were not supposed to be influenced by any information they had learned before viewing the trial. © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

Effects of Pretrial Publicity Options used to remedy this problem are the voir dire process (allowing lawyers to question prospective jurors before the trial), and judges instructing jurors to disregard what they have heard before the trial. © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

Effects of Pretrial Publicity However, these precautions do not always work. One problem is that people are often unaware that they have been biased by pretrial publicity. Secondly, judges can instruct jurors to disregard what they have heard in the media, but studies show that these instructions do little to erase the effects of pretrial publicity, and may even increase the likelihood that jurors use it. © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

Effects of Pretrial Publicity Thirdly, linking a person’s name with incriminating events can cause negative impressions of the person, even if the media explicitly deny any such connection. Thus, media reports can have unintended negative effects, and, once there, those effects are difficult to erase. © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

Information Processing During the Trial During the trial jurors attempt to make sense out of the testimony, and often decide on one story that explains all of the evidence. Then they try to fit the story to the possible verdicts they are allowed to render. If one of the verdicts fits their preferred story, they are likely to convict. © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

Information Processing During the Trial This explanation has important implications for how lawyers present their cases. Prosecution lawyers tend to present their evidence in story order, while defense lawyers present their case in witness order. © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

Information Processing During the Trial Story order: the evidence is presented in the sequence in which events occurred, corresponding as closely as possible to the story the prosecution wants the jurors to believe. Witness order: witnesses are presented in the sequence thought to have the greatest impact, even if it means the events are described out of order. The story order has been shown to be more effective (see Pennington & Hastie, 1988; Table SPA3.1). © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

Deliberations in the Jury Room During deliberations jurors with minority views are often pressured into conforming to the view of the majority. Thus verdicts usually correspond to the initial feelings of the majority of jurors. © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

Deliberations in the Jury Room If jury deliberation is stacked toward the initial, majority opinion, why not abandon the deliberation process, and let the jury’s initial vote determine a defendant’s guilt or innocence? Because: i) the process of deliberation makes people consider the evidence more systematically ii) minority opinion often does change people’s minds about the degree of guilt, which usually results in a reduced sentence. © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

Why Do People Obey the Law?
Do Severe Penalties Deter Crime? Ultimately, the success of the legal system depends on keeping people out of it. How best can we do this? Deterrence theory suggests one possibility. Deterrence Theory: the theory that people refrain from criminal activity because of the threat of legal punishment, as long as the punishment is perceived as relatively severe, certain, and swift. © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

Do Severe Penalties Deter Crime? Do severe penalties deter crime? It seems not. Studies show that increasing the severity of penalties for drunk driving is not, by itself, related to fewer alcohol-related motor vehicle fatalities. But, consistent with deterrence theory, increasing the certainty of being caught for drunk driving is. © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

Do Severe Penalties Deter Crime? Now, consider murder and capital punishment. A majority of Americans support the death penalty for murder because they believe it acts as a deterrent. Does it? © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

Do Severe Penalties Deter Crime? A number of studies have been conducted i) comparing murder rates in U.S. states that have the death penalty with those that do not ii) comparing the murder rates in U.S. states before and after the introduction of the death penalty iii) comparing murder rates in other countries before and after the death penalty was introduced. © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

Do Severe Penalties Deter Crime? The results are clear. There is no evidence that the death penalty prevents murders. Statistics show that most murders are crimes of passion that are not preceded by a rational consideration of the consequences. Capital punishment would not be expected to apply here. © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

Do Severe Penalties Deter Crime? Moreover, studies have found that executions are followed by an increase, not a decrease, in murders, as would be predicted from deterrence theory. This is explained by social learning theory—imitation of aggression. Observing the government put someone to death lowers inhibitions, and makes it more likely that such behaviour will be imitated. © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

Procedural Justice: People’s Sense of Fairness People also obey laws because of their moral values of what constitutes good behaviour. They will obey a law if they think that it is just, or fair, even if they are unlikely to be caught breaking it. This is the notion of procedural justice. Procedural Justice: people’s judgments about the fairness of the procedures used to determine outcomes, such as whether they are innocent or guilty of a crime. The End © 2004 Pearson Education Canada Inc.

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