Legal Psychology Final Exam

Bias-reducing instructions are used to assist eyewitnesses to be accurate in their identification of a suspect. An example of such instructions is telling the eyewitness that:

"The true criminal might not be in the lineup or photo spread"

Techniques such as biting the tongue, pressing the toes to the floor, or counting backwards are all examples of:

Countermeasures to polygraph testing

(T/F) Patihis, Ho, Tingen, Lilienfeld, and Loftus (2014) reported strong agreement between clinical practitioners and the research scientists in regard to memory beliefs.

False

(T/F) Richard, Smith, Fogel, and Bjerregaard (2015) reported empirical evidence for the "domestic discount" in capital cases.

False

(T/F) The American Psychology Law Society (AP-LS) was established in the 1850s.

False

What are the stages in the Interrogation Phrase of the Reid technique?

1. Positive confrontation 2. Theme development 3. Handling Denials 4. Overcoming objections 5. Procuring and retaining the suspect's attention 6. Handling the suspect's passive mood 7. Presenting an alternate question 8. Detailing the offense 9. Written or oral confession

In the Kassin and Kiechel's Alt Key false confession study, what was the compliance rate in the high vulnerability/false evidence condition?

100%

Suppose you were an eyewitness to a robbery. While being questioned at the scene of the crime, the police inform you that they have picked up a suspect. They ride the suspect by you in a police car, and they ask you whether the suspect was the perpetrator. You have just participated in

A show-up

A line-up procedure in which the police officers administrating the line-up and the eyewitness making the identification are both unaware of the potential suspect would reflect

A double-blind procedure

Daryl Atkins was convicted of abducting and killing a male in Virginia and was sentenced to death. He successfully appealed to the Supreme Court, which ruled that it is unconstitutional to execute the mentally retarded. Which of the following is the best statement of the outcome of this case?

A jury determined that he was mentally retarded and he was sentenced to life in prison

Cognizable refers to potential jurors being:

Acknowledged as sharing a particular characteristic setting them apart from other jurors

A jury must decide whether a defendant, already judged guilty, should receive the death penalty. The defendant raped, murdered, and then mutilated the victim. This fact could argue for the application of the death penalty. This is an example of a(n) _______________ factor.

Aggravating

Unanimity is required by _____ of the states in capital murder trials.

All

Twenty-eight year old Stephanie was in a study in which she was asked questions about the abuse she suffered when she was a very young child (this abuse was well documented by medical reports that Stephanie has not seen). Stephanie insists that she did not experience abuse. Which of the following could explain why Stephanie is not reporting this well-documented abuse?

All of these are possibilities

Kermit is a prospective juror who is currently undergoing voir dire . The defense attorney asks him, "What experiences have you had in your life that caused you to believe that a person was being discriminated against because of the color of his skin?" What kind of question is this?

An open-ended question

A total of 24 White persons and six Black persons are called for jury duty. The trial is for armed robbery, the defendant is Black, and the prosecuting attorney uses peremptory challenges given to him to exclude six Blacks. What should the judge do, according to Supreme Court decisions?

Ask the prosecuting attorney to explain the grounds for each of his six decisions and determine if the attorney had grounds other than race

According to researchers, people's ability to distinguish lies has a ____ rate of accuracy, and efforts to improve people's ability to discern lies have ____.

Barely above chance; not been very successful

April displays conventional values, with relatively inflexible viewpoints, generally identifying with authority figures and finding weakness to be intolerable. One might consider her personality to be that of:

Being authoritarian

The ability of humans to maintain relatively harmonious social relationships is facilitated by our capacity to _____ the truth.

Bend and reshape

Beth and Joanne are jurors for a case in which the defendant has been charged with robbery. Beth has a tendency to make internal, stable, and global attributions. Joanne has a tendency to make external, unstable, and specific attributions. Given this information, what are Beth and Joanne's likely ideas about defendant responsibility?

Beth will tend to see the offender as more responsible for his crime that Joanne

Based on the text, the advantage of information-gathering techniques over accusatorial methods is that:

Both approaches increase the number of true confessions while information-gathering techniques reduce false confessions

Mistakes in the identification process typically occur

Both at the moment a crime is committed and during the investigation of a crime

Please select the names of current Supreme Court Justices

Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, John Roberts, Neil Gorsuch, Elena Kagan, Samuel Alito, Stephen Breyer

After an intense interrogation process, Matthew became convinced that he robbed the store. This form of false confession is called a:

Coerced-internalized confession

Jared was questioning a suspect using the Reid technique, and after a long and exhausting interrogation, the suspect falsely confessed to the crime just to put an end to the interrogation. When hearing this confession, Jared felt even more confident that the suspect was guilty. This is an illustration of the phenomenon that psychologists call:

Confirmation bias

The following states are part of the Second Court of Appeals:

Connecticut, New York, and Vermont

During jury selection in cases in which the prosecutor seeks a death penalty, prospective jurors are required to answer questions about their attitudes toward capital punishment. This procedure is called _______.

Death qualification

Differences in goals, methods, and styles of inquiry made the relationship between psychology and law:

Difficult but important

If the cause of someone's misfortune can be blamed on _____________ attributions, then there is less pressure to help them.

Dispositional

Training people to detect lies ____ their ability ____ their confidence in their ability to discern lies.

Does not improve; but raises

The ultimate goal of interrogating a suspect is to:

Elicit a confession

Lapses of attention are most likely to affect which stage of the process of memory work?

Encoding

One problem with the Best Interest of the Child Standard (BICS) is that it can:

Escalate conflicts between parents

Shane was involved in a highly charged court case. His job was to provide an overview of research to assist the jury in making a well-informed decision regarding the suspect, in particular, in regard to the suspect's confession. Shane was called in to serve in what capacity?

Expert witness

(T/F) Empirical research on the validity of the polygraph suggest that over 90% of suspects are classified as true positives.

False

Bert committed a crime and is currently undergoing a polygraph test. He is trying some countermeasures that he read about on the Internet, and he is hoping that, with the help of these countermeasures (e.g., controlled breathing), he will be able to fool the polygraph examiner. If he succeeds in fooling the examiner, he could be said to be a

False negative

During interrogation of a suspect, openly physical brutality was ____ prior to 1930.

Frequently used

Negative pretrial publicity makes jurors more likely to see the defendant as _____. When studies assessed if the judge's instructions to disregard the negative publicity make a difference, they found that such instructions _____.

Guilty; do not remedy the situation

All of the following traits can be defined as vulnerability to making a false confession, EXCEPT:

High aggression

In Kovera and McAuliff (2000), untrained judges gave ____ admissibility ratings to the confounded study than the scientifically trained judges.

Higher

The Cognitive Interview would not involve

Hypnotizing the victim

Russano, Meissner, Narchet, and Kassin (2005) reported that the use of minimization tactics ________ the rates of true confessions and that the offer of leniency ___________ the rates of false confessions.

Increased; increased

In recent decades, the instances of joint legal custody have been:

Increasing

Daniela was _____and she waived her Miranda rights during her arrest. She decided to tell the police her side of the story without waiting for an attorney. The most likely reason she did that is because she has _____.

Innocent; nothing to hide

What was traditionally called "the third degree" refers to:

Interrogation tactics that included direct physical violence

Diane was the sole witness to a crime. After witnessing the crime, she talked with her husband and her co-workers about what she saw. These discussions potentially can taint her memory of the crime event for it can

Introduce post-event information that may alter her memory for the original event

Greg is viewing a lineup with simultaneous presentation. He had told police that the person he saw commit the crime is white with light color hair. When presented with six white people in his lineup, he chooses the person who has the lightest color hair in the group. How would we best characterize this judgment?

It is a relative judgement

In contrast to the crime control model, the due process model would subscribe to which of the following statements?

It is better for many guilty persons to go free than to convict one innocent person

Research by Kassin and his colleagues has shown that even when ____ had no problem recognizing that a confession was coerced, they still voted ____ more often.

Jurors; guilty

Marissa is being polygraphed using the guilty knowledge test (GKT). This test focuses on whether Marissa:

Knows facts that one would expect that only the criminal would know

Legal realism, as expressed by Karl Llewellyn in the 1920s-1930s, embodied all of the following views, EXCEPT:

Law should be judged independent of its effects

Among the traits noted as being associated with jurors' verdicts is how people tend to explain what happens to them, or how they answer the question: Are you mostly responsible for what happens to you? This trait is referred to as:

Locus of control

Jack was extremely uncomfortable with admitting to a crime against a minor so he kept denying any involvement. The interrogator has been very understanding and nice, and suggested that Jack had committed the crime without realizing the victim was a minor, since she looked so mature and acted like an adult. This situation illustrates a combination of which influence strategies inherent in the Reid technique?

Loss of control and minimization of culpability

According to the text, the "____ hypothesis" posits that human intelligence was accelerated by the need for humans to develop social skills related to manipulation, pretense, and deception.

Machiavellian intelligence

What have researchers found regarding jurors' abilities to understand the judge's instructions?

Many jurors are unable to understand the judge's instructions

Consider the following interrogation scenario: Tom Jones is being interrogated for the murder of his girlfriend. The police officer conduction the interrogation screams the following at Tom: "I am 100% sure that you committed this crime. We found your fingerprints on the knife. This is first degree murder unless you confess and explain what happened right now." In actuality, the police have no fingerprint evidence. How would you best characterize the "scare tactic" interrogation techniques being used by the police officer?

Maximization techniques

We should be especially skeptical of allegedly recovered memories in the following cases, EXCEPT:

Memories of abuse came back as flashes of particular incidents

Certain characteristics of the defendant are often considered by jurors. For example, Phillip is a known thug and gang member. He was on trial for the death of a priest that he ran over while evading police. In this case, it is likely that Phillip will receive a verdict that would be _____ if he had killed a fellow gang member.

More harsh than

Claire is a prospective juror in a case in which there has been a lot of pre-trial publicity. Claire maintains that despite the fact that she has heard of the defendant and is aware of some of the negative publicity, she will be impartial. Should Claire be believed and chosen as a juror?

No, people do not always recognize the extent of their biases or they may not be willing to admit them

When jurors change their votes under the pressure from other jurors, even though they did not change their minds, this phenomenon is also referred to as:

Normative influence

Hannah is a trial consultant hired to assemble a shadow jury in a high-stakes trial. She may ask the shadow jury to perform all of the following tasks EXCEPT:

Observe actual jurors in the deliberation room

GKT is one of the most promising polygraph techniques to date. However, there are some limitations to its usefulness. These limitations include that:

Only B & C

Brandeis's brief in Muller v Oregon (1908) was a milestone in the development of the psychology and law union because it:

Opened the door for U.S. courts to use social scientific evidence

A defendant is deemed "guilty" or "not guilty" during _____ of a capital murder trial.

Phase one

Child custody issues may require the expertise of a psychologist to assist the court in deciding the fate of a child in the case of a divorce. _____ refers to how much time a child spends with each of the parents.

Physical custody

All of the following are possible explanation for waiving the Miranda rights, EXCEPT:

Police are very careful in explaining to suspects their rights

A police department decides to develop "community watch" groups in some neighborhoods in order to reduce the crime rate. A psychologist is called in to assist the police department in designing and critiquing this innovation. How would we best label this psychologist's role?

Policy evaluator

There are several problems with polygraph techniques that use the standard procedures like CQT. Which of the following is NOT one of these problems?

Polygraph techniques work especially well if a person believes the polygraph is nearly infallible

According to Pennington and Hastie, which of the following would be most likely to yield guilty verdicts from jurors?

Prosecution evidence presented in story order and defense evidence presented in witness order

The primary goal of psychological science is to:

Provide accurate explanations of human behavior

The Daubert trilogy of cases impacts trial courts by:

Putting the burden of decisions about allowing expert testimony on trial judges

Compared with 12-person juries, 6-person juries, on average:

Reach verdicts that are less predictable

Isabella is advocating for a change in the way domestic violence victims are treated by police and the courts. This is an example of the following role played by psychologists in the legal system:

Reformer

The comparison question test (CQT) posits that guilty individuals react more strongly to _____ questions, whereas innocent individuals react more strongly to _____ questions.

Relevant; comparison

Jury nullification acknowledges that while the public trusts jurors to resolve the facts and apply the law in a given case, they also expect them to _______

Represent the conscience of the community

Sam, Frank, and Tom, all Black males, committed crimes that are surprisingly similar. Frank murdered a Black female, a 40-year-old administrator on a suburban college campus. Sam murdered a White female, a 22-year-old student on a city college campus. Tom murdered a Black female, a 36-year-old professor on a city college campus. Given these details, who is more likely to be sentenced to death?

Sam

What is usually called jury _____ is actually a process of _____.

Selection; eliminating candidates from the jury pool

Kathryn's parents recently divorced. During the hearing for custody, it was determined that her mother would have legal and physical custody. This type of custody is known as:

Sole custody

According to research studies described in the text, mock jurors who reported that they disregarded the confession as clearly coerced were ____ likely to convict the defendant.

Still more

Even though the _____ is the best predictor of what kind of verdict the jury reaches in a case, different jurors evaluate and interpret the same evidence _____.

Strength of evidence; differently

It turns out that the jury nullification option is a double-edged sword. Studies have showed that the nullification instructions allow juries to treat _____ offenders more leniently and _____ offenders more harshly.

Sympathetic; unsympathetic

A major difference between an advocate and an expert witness is

The advocate strongly identifies with only one side

The knowledge and skills of cognitive psychologists might be most relevant for the legal system in which one of these cases?

When deciding whether the eyewitness is able to remember the scene of the crime

Berta is a developmental psychologist. Her knowledge and skills might be most relevant for the legal system in which one of these cases?

When evaluating the state of mind of a teenager who brought guns to school

The judge has assembled a group of prospective jurors and is asking them to raise their hand if the answer is "yes" to the following question. He asks, "Do any of you have an opinion at this time as to the guilt or innocence of the defendant?" The judge sees that no one has raised a hand, so he accepts all as jurors. Did the judge make a good decision?

The judge did not make a good decision as asking yes/no questions is not a good way to uncover jurors' biases

For a person to testify as an expert witness,

The judge must agree to admit the testimony

The Manson criteria, emphasized by courts, consist of five factors to be taken into account when evaluating eyewitness identification accuracy. The following factor was clearly disproven by research:

The level of confidence the witness is exhibiting about his or her memory of the event

The famous Brown v. Board of Education (1954) case, besides being one of the most important Supreme Court rulings of the 20th century, was a milestone in the psychology and law alliance for the following reason:

The ruling cited research conducted by social scientists

In Kennedy v. Louisiana (2008), the Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty should not be applied to rapists, even to child rapists, unless:

The victim died

Thomas is the victim of a crime, and he has been called down to the police station to view a lineup. After some thought, he chooses the fourth person from the left. The detective administering the lineup says, "Good, we thought that was the one." What is likely the result of this confirming feedback?

Thomas feels more confident about his identification

A polygraph shows that Kevin is guilty of murder, when in fact he is guilty. This is an example of a:

True positive

The basis of the adversarial system in law is that:

Truth will emerge as a result of contest between opposing sides

The repression hypothesis posits that traumatic memories can be maintained in the _____ for years, and the use of _____ techniques may be helpful in uncovering them.

Unconscious; relaxation and visualization

Michelle is in custody and being interrogated. One of the police officers is being nice and tries to empathize with her while the other one glares at her and accuses her of having committed the crime because of her greed. The behavior of the police officers is an example of:

Using a good cop-bad cop approach

Last night Laura was robbed at gunpoint. When asked to describe the perpetrator, she found that all she could remember was the gun and not the way the perpetrator looked. Which of the best following describes this circumstance?

Weapon focus effect

Jasmine is a social psychologist. Her knowledge and skills might be most relevant for the legal system in which one of these cases?

When studying how the type of interrogation is related to the likelihood of false confession

The police are questioning Stuart and they tell him that they have a witness who saw him outside the victim's apartment. This is not true; they have no such witness. Are the police allowed to use a trick like this when they are trying to get a confession?

Yes, it is legal for police to consider evidence ploys in eliciting confessions

The ____ shows a video image of the brain in action.

fMRI

Jeremy purposely confessed to a crime he did not commit to cover for his wife. This type of confession is referred to as a:

voluntary false confession

Six-year-old Corey is a witness to a crime, and he has been asked to view a lineup. Unfortunately, the true perpetrator is not in the lineup. Researchers would predict that Corey, as compared to adults,

would be more likely to make a false positive error