Chapter 15- Social Psychology in Court

Which of the following statements is TRUE of eyewitness testimony?

A confident witness is not necessarily an accurate witness

Reactance

A motive to protect or restore one's sense of freedom. Reactance arises when someone threatens our freedom of action.

Which of the following statements is true about death-qualified jurors?

Death-qualified jurors are more concerned with crime control and less concerned with due process of law

Which of the following is recommended for increasing eyewitness accuracy and lineups?

Have eyewitnesses to carefully describe the suspect verbally before asking them to make a lineup choice

misinformation effect

Incorporating "misinformation" into one's memory of the event after witnessing an event and receiving misleading information about it

A prosecuting attorney is uncertain whether her eyewitness will seem credible to the jury. The eyewitness's testimony could help win a conviction, but the witness might be discredited by the defense attorney. What advice should the prosecutor accept?

Put the eyewitness on the stand, since even a discredited eyewitness is more convincing than no eyewitness at all

Which of the following statements is true about eyewitness testimony?

The majority of convicted individuals later exonerated were victims of mistaken eyewitnesses

Research indicates that eyewitnesses who remember trivial details of a crime scene _____.

are less likely to have paid attention to the culprit's face

Research suggests that jurors in the minority will be most persuasive when they _____.

begin to trigger some defections from the majority

Which of the following can result in an eyewitness gaining confidence?

being asked the same question repeatedly

Wells and his colleagues (2006) reported that it is the _____ eyewitnesses whom jurors find to be the most believable.

confident

Which of the following factors is NOT likely to lead to a lighter sentence for the person convicted?

height

Reserach shows that when a judge rules evidence to be inadmissible and admonishes the jury to ignore it _____.

jurors have a hard time ignoring the evidence and its influence on their deliberations

Which one of the following is an indicator that can suggest accuracy in lineup identification?

making a very quick identification

The process of witnessing an event, receiving misleading information about it, and then incorporating the misleading information into one's memory of the event is referred to as the _____ effect.

misinformation

Death-qualified jurors are _____.

more likely to convict in criminal cases

In researching over 1,700 defendants appearing in Texas misdemeanor cases, Downs and Lyons (1991) found that the judges _____ less attractive defendants.

set greater fines for

What is meant by the "two-thirds-majority" scheme?

the jury verdict is usually the alternative favored by at least two-thirds of the jurors at the outset

Loftus (1979) found that when an eyewitness who had testified against the defendant in a hypothetical robbery-murder case was discredited because of having poor vision _____.

the majority of jurors still voted for conviction

Researchers have found that eyewitnesses' accuracy can improve when _____.

they are presented with a sequence of individual people, one by one, instead of being presented with a group of photos ore a lineup