PSYC325 Studies

Zajac, Gross & Hayne, (2003)

In responce to cross-exam, children showed - - High rates of compliance with leading questions - Low rates of clarification seeking - even when questions didn't make sense - Misunderstandings of questions - During cross-exam, 75% of children made at least one change to their earlier testimony - range from small to entire changes. - 33% changed all of their earlier responses, only 15% didn't make any changes - Changes were irrespective of accuracy - both correct and incorrect responses were changed. - After cross exam, responses no better than chance - Even without 8 month delay, children still had same effects - Children do not believe the changes - socially driven - Verbal warnings have no affect

Wells et al (2000)

Suggested that the foild should be chosen based on the witness' verbal description instead of similarity to the suspect

Steblay et al. (1999)

- Meta analysis - Investigated 44 PTP studies involving 5755 participants - Participants exposed to negative PTP were more likely to judge the defendant guilty

Dror, Peron, Hind, & Charlton (2005)

- 27 participants asked to decide whether or not two fingerprints matched (96 trials) - Manipulated - ambiguous or non-ambiguous - Manipulated contextual information (control, low emotion eg. lamp, high emotion eg facial wound, HE + subliminal - No effect of contextual manipulation when task non-ambiguous - When task ambiguous, those in high emotion condition and high emotion + subliminal condition were more likely to find a match - Contextual information actively biases the way gaps are filled, but not sufficient to overrride clea bottom-up information

Sternberg, Lamb, Hershkowitz, et al. (1997)

- 51 investigative interviews with child complaints of sexual abuse (4-12 yo) - Style of rapport building manipulated (open-ended or direct) - "Tell me what you did on the first night of Hanukkah" vs "Did you light candes on the first night of Hannukah?" - First question - free recall of what happened - Children in the open-ended rapport condition uttered over twice as many words in response to the first interview question, also twice as much detail - Improvement maintained over subsequent open-ended questions

Zajac and Karageorge (2009)

- 8-11 year old children - Visit to police station - Confederate event - man came in briefly to room with students - TA or TP varied lineups - Wildcard or control - half got the wildcard (special card that meant that target was not there), or no wildcard - Wildcard option increased chidlren's performance in TA lineup - Did not affect TP lineup - In wildard conditions, TA and TP accuracy rates did not differ

Ziesel & Diamond (1978)

- Are jurors who are dismissed during juror selection any more or less likely to convict? - Examined juror votes 12 criminal trials - Persuaded dismissed jurors to stay in court and observe the case - Overall, lawyers are not much better than chance at selecting jurors, defense lawyers tend to be better

Correll, Park, Judd, & Wittenbank (2002)

- Computer simulation in which participants were asked to shoot only targets holding weapons - Participants more likely to shoot unarmed black people than unarmed white people - Even police show this bias

Loftus & Zanni (1975)

- Did you see A broken headlight vs THE broken headlight (definite) - More than twice as likely to say yes when the definite article was used - Research especially important for child witnesses, who generally report very little recall information and can be highly suggestible.

Bornstein et al. (2002)

- Examined mock jurors' perception of a lawsuit against a chemical company for causing ovarian cancer. - Mock jurors exposed to either - - Control (unbiased) PTP - facts - Anti-defendant PTP - against chemical company - Anti-plaintiff PTP - against person with ovarian cancer - Sympathy ratings were lower for the defendant than for the plaintiff - Sympathy ratings for the defendant and the plaintiff were both influenced by PTP - Relative to control, negative PTP about the defendant increased the number of guilty verdicts. - Relative to controls, negative PTP about the plaintiff decreased the number of guilty verdicts

Wessel & Merkelback (1997)

- Exposed people with or without spider phobias to a live spider in a jar - Memory for central events did not differ between groups - Phobic participants scored lower when asked about peripheral details

Garven, Wood, Malpass & Shaw (1998)

- Identified 5 problematic questioning techniques from the McMartin Preschool Case - Suggestive questions - Referring to other people - Positive and negative consequences - Asked and answered - Inviting speculation - 3-6 year olds - Experimented "Manny" came to the children's schools and read them a story. - Compared the use of the McMartin questioning "package" with the use of suggestive questions alone - "yes" answers to misleading questioning were much higher for the package condition than the suggestive questioning condition. - This resulted in many "false allegations" - "Yes" answers to misleading questions increased across the course of the interview - more yeses over time, false information by the end of it Studies have yet to find correlation between knowledge of interviewing techniques and use

McCloskey & Zaragoza (1985)

- Instead of presenting participants with a choice between the correct item and the misinformation item, these researchers presented them with a choice between the correct item and a novel item

Davis, Lopez, Koyama, et al. (2005)

- Listened to argument between couple - Half of the participants told they had broken up - Other half told that she was found dead and boyfriend was charged with murder - Memory for conversation assessed - Participants in murder condition more likely to accurately remember the threatening statements toward the girl and inaccurately recall that he had hit her and threatened to harm her classmate

Paterson & Kemp (2006)

- Many crimes involve more than one eyewitness - 86% of witnesses engage in co-witness discussion - According to witnesses, the primary purpose of these discussions is to "provide information". Court wants independent recollection though Possible advantages - May prompt witnesses to recall forgotten details - May reinforce memory - solidifying - May aid recovery from trauma - no clear evidence - May paint a more accurate overall picture Possible Disadvantages - May contaminate independent recollection - you may 'recall' someone else's account - May weaken prosecution case - consensus because people talk, not because they remember - Witnesses may become unsure of their testimony - May lead to reports of "common things" - only say what others also remember because they are unsure - Collusion - secret or illegal cooperation to deceive others

Gabber, Memon & Allen (2003)

- Pairs of participants watched a video of a simulated crime - Unbeknownst to participants, they each watched a slightly different video - Half of the participants were allowed to discuss the video with each other before being interviewed individually -71% of participants in the discussion condition reported items that they had not seen - None of the participants in the control condition reported unseen items - 60% of participants who had not seen the theft declared the girl guilty of stealing after discussing the video with a co-witness who saw the theft

Loftus, Loftus, & Messo (1987)

- Participant saw slides of a customer pulling out chequebook or gun - Participants made more correct identifications in the no weapon condition - Participants made more and longer eye fixations on the gun - Even in harmless situations, witnesses' eyes are automatically drawn to a weapon

Clark & Tunnicliff (2001)

- Participants asked to give verbal descriptions of the perp - 3 lineups, simultaneous type - TP, description-matched - TA, description-matched - TA , suspect-matched - No difference in overall accuracy, but description matching helps a lot more with wrong picking than suspect matching

Memon, Hope, & Gabbert (2002)

- Participants given a post-lineup questionnaire - 90% of participants expected the target to be present, despite clear instructions that he might not be there. - 95% recalled the instructions -47% of incorrect witnesses would make the same decisions in 'real life'

Payne (2011)

- Participants primed with black or white face, then asked to classify objects as tools or weapons - Those primed with black face quicker to categorise weapons and mistakenly identify tools as weapons when asked to react quickly - Reverse true for those primed with white face

Fraser (2011)

- Participants randomly assigned to one of two groups - Group A primed to believe that David Bain shot his family - Group B primed to believe his father did it - Opinion on what was said in the audio clip was sought at 7 different time points - Participants' perception of the tape's contents was significantly influenced by information they had been given - Only 4 of the group B participants (out of 190) heard "I shot the prick"

Darby and jeffers (1988)

- Participants read and evaluated 2 judicial cases - rule breaking, low crime - Defendant attractiveness was manipulated (H, M, L) - no 'no photo' condition - Asked to make judgments of guilt, punishment severity, and attractiveness - Asked to complete self-assessment questionnaire - included physical attractiveness - For both juror groups, guilty convictions increased as defendant attractiveness decreased - Overall, attractive jurors more likely to convict - For attractive jurors, punishment severity increased as defendant attractiveness decreased - For unattractive jurors, high attractive and low attractive defendants were given lower sentences than medium attractive defendants. Because more attractive people are treated better, and because less attractive people share common traits with unattractive jurors.

Pickel (1999)

- Participants saw slides of a target dressed as either a policeman or priest, and carrying either a gun or cellphone - Less accurate about the priest when he carried a gun - out of context - Memory accuracy for policeman did not differ according to the prop her carried

Lynch & Haney (2000)

- Potential jurors eitehr presented with a description of a black defendant/white victim murder case, or a white victim/black defendant murder case - Presented with death penalty isntructions - Verdicts assessed (death penalty or no death penalty) - When instruction comprehension was high, the race of the defendant had no impact on whether or not death was recommended - When juror comprehension was low, race played a significant role in decision-making -black defendant who murdered a white victim was almost twice as likely to be put to death than the other way around

Snyder & Uranowitz (1978)

- Read case history about "Betty K" - Immediately or 1 week later, participants either told that Betty was homosexual or heterosexual - Another group of participants was not told anything - Memory for case history assessed - Delay did not exert an effect on participants' responses - Participants made more label-consistent error than label-inconsistent errors

Loftus & Banaji (1989)

- Showed 4-minute video of a robbery and shooting - Exposed to a TV report of the incident, which either contained misinformation or not - Asked to evaluate news presenter - would the hire her - Memory for video assessed - Almost 1/3 of misinformed participants incorporated the misinformation into their subsequent memory reports - Control participants' reports were highly accurate

Cowan et al. (1984)

- Showed a 2-hour murder trial re-enactment to 288 eligible jurors. - Categorised jurors into death qualified and excludable - Formed juries comprising either all DQ or a misture of DQ and excludables - DQ juries were significantly more likely to convict than mixed - Mixed juries took a more serious approach to deliberation, were morecritical of eyewitness testimony, and were better able to remember the evidence

Jack, Martyn & Zajac (2015)

- Showed children, adolescents and adults a film clip of a simulated crime - Asked to give free recall of what happened 15 minutes later - Then asked to recall again, in one of four conditions - Own sketch - Provided sketch - Does drawing work because the person is doing it or because there is a drawing there? - Photograph - accurate and complete - No visual aid - maybe just remembering it because they are asked to recall again - Regardless of age, visual aids increased amount of information provided - Visual aids decreased the proportion of subjective information reported by participants of all ages, and reduced the proportion of errors made by children

Loftus & Burns (1982)

- Showed participants a short movie of a bank robbery with either a violent or non-violent ending - Those who watched the violent version had poorer memories for the detail seen immediately before the violence

Allport (1947)

- Showed participants photo of a shabbily-dressed white man holding a razor arguing with an unharmed, well-dressed black man. Asked to describe what was in the photo - In subsequent retellings, over half of the participants transposed the characters. No external misinformation - memory distortion.

Leippe, Wells, & Ostrom (1978)

- Staged a theft in front of a group of students - Thieved item was either expensive or trivial - Eyewitnesses made more accurate definitions (of the thief) when the crime was perceived as more serious - When value knowledge was gained AFTER the robbery, the effect was not observed - so not an encoding error

Loftus & Palmer (1974)

- Subject viewed film of car accident - Then answered questions about the film immediately afterwards - Manipulation = wording, how fast were cars going when they XXX into each other - Subjects' estimates of speed were dependent on the question wording - Assessed report of broken glass at the scene (none) - Reporting of broken glass was related to the wording of the speed estimate question at the start.

Fitzgerald and Ellsworth (1984)

- Surveyed a sample of 811 eligible jurors - 64% supported death penalty - 17% didn't Death qualified jurors were - More likely to favour the prosecution's viewpoint - More likely to mistrust criminal defendants - More in favour of punitive approaches toward offenders - More concerned with crime control than with due process - Very biased

Phillips et al., (1999)

- TA lineups - Single-blind - Investigator knows the suspect position in the lineup - Double-blind - no one knows - A lineup administrator's knowledge of the suspect's position in the lineup can increase false identification rates in cases where the suspect is innocent - This is especially likely in sequential lineups - "Double blind" administration will safeguard against this

Efran (1974)

Part 1. - 108 students answered the following two questions on a 6-point likert scale - Should jurors be influenced by the defendant's character and previous history - (77% yes) - Should jurors be influenced by the defendant's attractiveness? (7% yes) Part 2. - 66 students took part in a simulated jury experiment - Case study of a student caught cheating in an exam - only difference whas the photo they got given with the story - Attractive, less attractive or no photo - Participants asked to rate defendant attractiveness, likelihood of guilt, and punishment severity - Attractive defendants considered less guilty and given less severe punishment than unattractive defendants. - No photo = rating between the two Exception when attractiveness helped a person commit the crime - opposite effect

Absolut Distortions - Assefj & Garry (2003)

People that think they are susceptible to misinformation and test them against this - All drank tonic beverage, but half told that it was alcoholic - Participants then took part in the standard misinformation procedure - Alcohol group more susceptible to misleading post-event misinformation - if you expect you're a bit drunk then you're more likely to be vulnerable to misinformation - But encoding did not differ between the two groups - memory for control items is just as goof, so not an encoding problem. Willingness to take on information is the difference.

Osborne & Zajac (2015)

Repeated Dror's experiment but this time gave no emotional contextual information - Results suggested that Dror's findings were due to emotional context, rather than people merely making more matches over time - Emotion per se was not the driving force - no effect observed when they used highly emotional pictures that were not crime-related (eg. natural disaster)