Chapter 7: Legal Psych

In fact, mistaken identifications played a role in _________ of cases where wrongly convicted persons were released from prison because DNA testing later proved their innocence

76%

another study on this issue mentioned in class just looked at sexual assault cases of the 120 exonerated prisoners who were sentenced for ______% were because of a false eyewitness identification

88%

meta-analysis

A statistical procedure that compiles the overall findings from a large group of related research studies.

estimator variables

Factors that are outside the control of the legal system and that are related to the accuracy of an eyewitness identification (e.g., weapon focus, lighting conditions, etc.).

system variables

Factors that are under the control of the legal system; most commonly used in eyewitness identification research (e.g., lineup procedures).

Research on time passing during stressful situations.

found time tends to seem much slower ( about 3 to 4 times slower)

Some researchers have noted that this weakness to select a true culprit not presented in a lineup may be attributable to the ______________________________ of children

greater suggestibility

These prosecutors are half right: Watching a crime in progress certainly triggers stress. But the effect of this arousal on the encoding of information is generally negative, partly because the arousal frequently includes fear for one's own physical safety. One team of researchers conducted a meta-analysis of 27 studies designed to test the effect of stress on person identification. Their conclusion:

high stress impairs memory and consequently reduces the rate of correct identifications

People usually recall more information when they are hypnotized than when they are not hypnotized. This phenomenon is called _________________________________

hypnotic hypermnesia

Recall of a crime scene may also be altered depending on how the eyewitness is initially questioned. In one laboratory study, people looked at slides of a student dorm room that had been burglarized. Experimenters later used selective questioning when asking about details of the crime scene (Koutstaal, Schacter, Johnson, & Galluccio, 1999). Although there were many textbooks in the picture of the room experimenters asked only about particular types of sweatshirts. Results?

people tended to have good recall of the sweatshirts but poor recall of other objects, such as textbooks

physiognomic variability

perceived differences based on physical features

Interestingly, witnesses were not aware that they had been swayed by the feedback. This tendency for biased feedback to distort the memory of eyewitnesses is called the ____________________________ and has been documented across many studies

postidentification feedback effect

Scripts enable us to _______________________________. Because we know what to expect, we do not have to treat each situation as completely new or unique. But scripts can also lead to error. If information is lacking or insufficiently encoded, we often rely on scripts to fill in gaps in our memory.

process information efficiently

Charles Morgan and his colleagues were able to examine the impact of high stress on eyewitness accuracy by studying 509 soldiers during "survival training". Although the precise details of the training are classified, it is meant to simulate the experience of being captured and held as a prisoner of war. The experience is "modeled from the experiences of actual military personnel who have been prisoners of war" and includes "wilderness evasion" and "mock captivity in a prisoner of war camp." *A key variable in the study was whether a mock interrogation (which lasted about 40 minutes) was high or low stress*. The critical feature of the high-stress interrogation was that it included "real physical confrontation." Participants were asked to identify their interrogator, what were the results?

rate of correct identifications was significantly higher for participants in the low-stress condition: about *71%* of participants in the *low-stress condition made a correct identification*, compared to about *38% of participants in the high-stress condition.* Also notice that only about *25%* of people in the low-stress condition *identified the wrong person*, but in the *high-stress condition, 58% identified the wrong person.*

People v. Lerma (2016)

recognized that eyewitness testimony is not always reliable

simultaneous lineups relies on sequential lineups relies on

relative judgement absolute judgement

Retrieval

the process of getting information out of memory storage

Other times, the person wrongly identified is someone seen near the scene of the crime or someone seen as part of the identification process. This situation is called _________________________________.

unconscious transference

sequential vs simultaneous lineups for kids

using either one does not make a difference for kids not identifying a suspect. that is, kids will always identify a suspect even if he is not in the lineup

The legal system has a few time-honored techniques for revealing truth. These techniques include?

voir dire (the questioning of potential jurors during jury selection), cross examination, and jury deliberation.

five factors that should be taken into account when evaluating the accuracy of an eyewitness's identification called Manson criteria:

(1) the witness's opportunity to view the perpetrator (2) the witness's level of attention (3) the accuracy of the witness's previous description of the offender (4) the witness's degree of certainty (5) the amount of time between witnessing the crime and making the identification.

Perry v. New Hampshire (2012)

"We do not doubt the either the fallibility or the importance of eyewitness evidence generally." "Absent improper police conduct, these safeguards, we hold, keep the introduction of eyewitness identification evidence within constitutional bounds" did not revise the Manson criteria

Reseasons why police do not want to switch line up methods

(1) We do not think it is broken, so why try to fix it? (2) It will cost too much to put the reforms in place. (3) It will slow our investigations and weaken our prosecutions. (4) It is soft on crime. (5) It favors the defense. (6) We are the professionals, and we know what is best. In addition (as in other areas of psychology and law), there is the fear that if reforms are made, the courts might be flooded with appeals by people who were convicted based on pre-reform procedures. Finally, even when a police department adopts research-based recommendations for conducting lineups, there is often insufficient training of the police officers who are responsible for putting the reforms into practice

As Wells and Quinlivan (2009) point out, we must rely on the self-reports of eyewitnesses to evaluate three of the five Manson criteria which are?

(certainty, view, and attention).

Research on cross-race effect for different age groups

-The bias appears to be present in babies as young as nine months old -is consistent in strength for kindergartners, young children, and adults

One study examined 347 cases in which the only evidence was eyewitness testimony. In ________ of these cases, the defendant was convicted. In _________ of the cases in which the defendant was convicted, there was _______________________

74% 49%/ only one eyewitness

In a series of classic experiments, Elizabeth Loftus and her colleagues demonstrated how eyewitness recall could be altered by seemingly trivial changes in the wording of questions (Loftus & Palmer, 1974). Several groups of participants in her experiments viewed films of a car crash. Half the participants were asked to estimate the speed of the car when it "turned right," and the other half were asked to estimate the speed of the car when it "ran the stop sign." Later, when the participants were asked whether they had seen a stop sign, ________1. of the first group reported seeing one, while __________2. of the second group reported seeing the sign. When a statement about a barn was included in the questioning process, ________3. of the participants remembered seeing a barn, even though none appeared in the film. When participants were asked, "*Did you see the broken headlight*?" they were more than ________4. as likely to recall seeing a broken headlight than participants who were asked, "*Did you see a broken headlight*?" Estimates of the speed of the cars also varied as a function of question wording. Some participants were asked, "About how fast were the two cars going when they contacted each other?" In other versions of the question, the words hit, bumped, and smashed were substituted for contacted. Cars contacting each other yielded an estimate of ______5. miles per hour, while cars smashing into each other yielded an estimate of ______6. miles per hour. Only subtle variations in wording were used, but these small variations produced substantial changes in memory.

1. 35% 2. 53% 3. 17% 4. twice 5. 31 6. 40.8

A third difficulty concerns the contingent, complex nature of some research findings. For example, a meta-analysis revealed that the advantage of the sequential procedure depends on whether the actual culprit is present or absent in the lineup. In a culprit-absent lineup, the witness correctly recognizes that the culprit is not present ______1. of the time when a sequential procedure is used. This recognition occurs only ________2. of the time when a simultaneous procedure is used. However, in culprit-present lineups, the culprit is correctly identified ________3. of the time using a sequential procedure, but about _______4. of the time using a simultaneous procedure (Steblay, Dysart, & Wells, 2011).

1. 68% 2.46% 3. 44% 4.52% Overall, sequential lineups lead to the benefit of significantly reducing the risk of false identifications but at the cost of some smaller reduction of correct identifications (roughly 8%).

The six most important guidelines by APLS and NAS

1. Blind Lineup Administrators 2. Bias-Reducing Instructions to Eyewitnesses 3. Unbiased Lineups 4. Confidence Ratings 5. Video Recording 6. Expert Testimony

Top 4 leading causes of false convictions

1. eyewitness identification 2. forensic science problems 3. false confessions 4. faulty informant or snitch testimony

Children are _________________1. accurate than adults when presented with lineups or photo spreads if the true perpetrator is present in the lineup (this is called ___________________2. or _____________________2. , lineup). If the true perpetrator is absent from the lineup (called a _________________3. or ______________3. , lineup), children do _____________4.

1. only slightly less 2. a culprit-present, or target-present 3. culprit-absent, or target-absent 4. worse

jury deliberation, places fact finding in the hands of a group of citizens. Unfortunately, research shows_____________________ 3 things

1. that jurors place undue faith in the reliability of eyewitnesses 2. place too much weight on eyewitness confidence. 3. are not very skilled at distinguishing between accurate and inaccurate eyewitnesses

Steps of cognitive interview

1. the interviewer attempts to reduce the witness's anxiety, to develop rapport and help the witness concentrate. The interviewer asks the witness to report what happened, without interference, thereby avoiding suggestive questioning. 2. the witness closes his or her eyes and attempts to reinstate the context of the crime mentally 3. third phase involves probing the images and actions the witness reports. In this phase, witness recalls events in different orders 4. entails taking different perspectives on the crime, such as mentally viewing the event from the perspective of the criminal and the victim (reads them back to uncover errors or omissions) 5. background information is collected, and the interviewer emphasizes that the witness should call if he or she remembers new information

The cross-race effect is not large (misidentification is ________ times more likely when the suspect is of a different race than the witness), but it is consequential for the legal system.

1.56

Gary Wells and Amy Bradfield (1998) conducted a revealing study of how eyewitness confidence can be manipulated.

352 people mistakenly identified the wrong person and was randomly assigned one of three conditions: confirming feedback, contradictory feedback, or no feedback. Those who heard confirming feedback later remembered being very certain at the time of the initial identification, while those receiving disconfirming feedback later recalled being uncertain at the time. Those who were told that they fingered the right man also remembered having a better view of the criminal, having made the identification more easily, and having paid more attention to the crime.

Robert Buckhout, one of the first psychologists to conduct systematic research on eyewitnesses, staged a series of thefts and assaults in his classroom. Of the students who witnessed the mock crime, ____ showed the unconscious-transference effect.

39%

6. Expert Testimony

A final safeguard is to have an expert on eyewitness identification testify in court. -often admitted at trial

3. Unbiased Lineups

A lineup or photo spread constructed such that the actual suspect does not stand out from the fillers. Nothing about the procedure should draw extra attention to the actual suspect.

1. Blind Lineup Administrators

A person directing a lineup or photo spread who has no knowledge of which person in the lineup or photo spread is the actual suspect. - although this is rarely followed

cross-race effect

A phenomenon affecting eyewitness identification in which people have more difficulty recognizing the faces of people outside their racial group than the faces of those within their racial group.

cognitive dissonance

A psychological theory that predicts that a person who has committed to a particular course of action will become motivated to justify that course of action.

Storage

A stage of memory processing; encoded information is held in the brain over time.

Encoding

A stage of memory processing; information is gathered and placed in a form that can be held in memory.

weapon focus effect

A stress-related effect in which an eyewitness's ability to recognize a perpetrator is impaired if the eyewitness sees the perpetrator holding a weapon and focuses his or her attention on that weapon because it poses great danger. Consequently, the eyewitness pays less attention to other important details of the crime, like the face of the criminal.

cognitive interview

A subtle step-by-step procedure designed to relax a witness and reinstate mentally the context surrounding the crime. The goal is to improve the retrieval of accurate information while avoiding the increased suggestibility of hypnosis.

hypnosis

A technique for inducing a relaxed, focused state in which the subject is highly receptive and responsive to suggestions made by the hypnotist.

who coined hypnosis after what?

An English physician coined the term hypnosis after Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep

2. Bias-Reducing Instructions to Eyewitnesses

An instruction given to eyewitnesses during a lineup identification procedure, specifying that the true criminal "might not be in the lineup or photo spread." -reduces mistaken identifications by 42% without having an effect on the number of correct identifications.

unconscious transference

An unintentional act in which a face that is familiar from some other context is transferred to the scene of a crime.

State v. Lawson (2012)

Court must apply rules of evidence criteria to question of admissibility of eyewitness evidence the Oregon supreme court held that, "When there are facts demonstrating that a witness could have relied on something other than his or her own perceptions to identify the defendant," the prosecution must "establish by a preponderance of the evidence that the identification was based on a permissible basis rather than an impermissible one, such as suggestive police procedures." In addition, Oregon established a role for expert testimony for the purpose of enabling "judges and jurors to evaluate eyewitness identification testimony according to relevant and meaningful criteria."

_____________-race accuracy is worse than __________-race accuracy. This tendency is usually referred to as the _____________________

Cross within cross-race effect

Unfortunately, skillful use of the cognitive interview requires police to adopt an interviewing style quite different from their usual style However police in _____________ have started training in this technique due to research showing that it improves recall of accurate information without an increase in witness suggestibility

England and Wales not yet in USA

Who first used hypnosis? and believed what? How does it actually work?

Franz Anton Mesmer believed that he could induce hypnotic states through the use of "animal magnetism." A scientific committee chaired by Benjamin Franklin investigated his claims and concluded that hypnosis was induced through the power of suggestion

an ongoing controversy involves whether police should use sequential or simultaneous lineups? what's the difference?

In sequential lineups, an eyewitness sees one person (or photograph) at a time, decides whether that person was the perpetrator, and then sees the next person. In contrast, in the more commonly used simultaneous lineup, several people are standing side by side (or several facial photographs are laid out next to one another).

The U.S. Department of Justice used these proposals to create guidelines for police and investigators (Department of Justice, 1999). More recent research and a 2014 report by the _____________________________ suggested 2 additional guidelines.

National Academies of Science (NAS)

In two key cases—_____________________ and ____________________—the courts have emphasized five factors that should be taken into account when evaluating the accuracy of an eyewitness's identification:

Neil v. Biggers (1972) and Manson v. Braithwaite (1977)

explanations for the cross-race effect

Physiognomic variability may tend to look at facial characteristics of other races may be because we are not exposed to other races as much these characteristics may be easier to distinguish with experience of being around other races Overall the reasons are not clear

who helped Ronald Cotton

Richard Rosen

When witnesses identify the wrong person, it is usually a meaningful misidentification because_______________

Sometimes the person wrongly identified resembles the real perpetrator

fillers (or foils or distractors)

The alternative suspects in a lineup or photo spread; they should resemble each other and match the witness's verbal description of the offender.

Brian Cutler, Steven Penrod, and Hedy Dexter (1990) conducted a series of experiments to gauge the impact on jurors of being exposed to psychological testimony on the limitations of eyewitness identifications. These studies used realistic trial simulations and varied several factors: the conditions under which the eyewitness viewed the crime, whether the identification procedures were impartial or biased, the confidence of the eyewitness, and whether expert testimony about eyewitness identification was present or absent. Experts were subjected to tough cross-examination, just as they would be in a real trial. What were the results?

The expert testimony had the desired effect: It sensitized jurors to the importance of viewing and lineup conditions that compromise or enhance accuracy, and it caused jurors to put less credence in witness confidence as an indicator of accuracy. The mock jurors who did not hear expert testimony overestimated the accuracy of eyewitnesses, did not take into account factors known to reduce accuracy, and placed substantial weight on eyewitness confidence as an indicator of accuracy. It appears that when expert testimony is provided to jurors, they are able to make appropriate use of the information experts provide

retrieval inhibition

The phenomenon in which selectively retrieving only some aspects of a scene inhibits recall of other aspects.

Two factors that can boost the confidence of a witness selecting a culprit

The police may tell you that they believe you identified the right person or they may say that other witnesses described the same person

postidentification feedback effect

The tendency for biased feedback after identification to distort the memory of eyewitnesses. Such feedback inflates eyewitnesses' confidence in their identification.

In a follow-up study, research participants heard a mock trial of a defendant accused of a convenience store robbery. Most elements of the typical script were included in the evidence presentations. However, key elements of the script (e.g., casing the store, pulling out a gun, and taking the money) were not part of the evidence presented. Results?

These excluded elements still found their way into the jurors memories of the convenience store robbery

scripts

Widely held beliefs about which sequences of actions will typically occur in particular situations. ex. first day of class

5. Video Recording

a video recording of the lineup identification would serve as a lasting, objective, audiovisual record of what transpired during the identification process. Attorneys, judges, and juries could see and hear for themselves what instructions were given to witnesses, whether members of the lineup resembled one another, what feedback was given to the witness immediately after identification, how confident the witness appeared during the lineup, what sorts of comments were made by police or other witnesses, and how long the entire process took

In 1998, the American Psychology-Law Society (APLS) appointed a committee to review more than a quarter century of research on eyewitness testimony, with the goal of developing guidelines for gathering evidence from eyewitnesses. The committee report proposed four simple reforms that would dramatically reduce the number of mistaken identifications, with little or no reduction in the number of correct identifications. These modifications concerns who?

administers the lineup or photo spread, the instructions given to witnesses viewing lineups or photo spreads, who appears in the lineup alongside the suspect, and obtaining information about eyewitness confidence

Like memory itself, confidence appears to be malleable. The postidentification boost in confidence might be partly explained by the theory of _______________________

cognitive dissonance

One promising alternative has been developed and refined by Ron Fisher and Edward Geiselman (2010). This technique—called the _________________________

cognitive interview

Sometimes, a face seen in a mug shot leads to unconscious transference. This possibility exists whenever an eyewitness sees mug shots before making an identification in a lineup. In a series of studies, prior exposure to mug shots led to a ____________ in correct identifications and an ____________ in mistaken identifications

decrease increase

Which criteria can be highly misleading at trial?

degree of certainty

post-event information

details about an event to which an eyewitness is exposed after the event has occurred

research shows that hypnosis _________________ the recall of accurate information

does not increase

When eyewitnesses describe a criminal or pick a suspect out of a lineup, they are relying on memory. So, to understand the process of eyewitness identification, it is essential to understand the basics of how memory works. Psychologists who study memory have found it useful to distinguish between three component processes:

encoding, storage, and retrieval

estimator variables are helpful in _________________________________

estimating the accuracy of an identification

The justice system cannot control who witnesses a crime, how carefully that person observes the crime, or whether the race of the victim is different from the race of the criminal. Such factors, which are outside the control of the legal system, are called ____________________

estimator variables

Why is Blind Lineup Administrators not always followed?

experimenters may unintentionally communicate their expectations to people participating in their experiments.

Voir dire is intended to ______________________________ However_________________________

expose potentially biased jurors so that attorneys can dismiss them. But there is no set of questions that will reveal whether potential jurors will view eyewitness testimony with appropriate skepticism.

The Ronald Cotton case indicates the fallibility of

eyewitness accounts.

research suggests that eyewitnesses are far more _____________________________

fallible than is commonly supposed.

State v. Henderson (2011)

if a defendant can show police meddled in the eyewitness ID process, the court must hold a pretrial hearing, more tailored set of jury instructions that delineate circumstances known to diminish the reliability of eyewitnesses

Some advocates of hypnosis note that it may sometimes serve as a useful "face-saving" device. for example?

if a witness who is afraid of reprisal initially says that she cannot remember details of the crime, she may later be reluctant to disclose information because she would have to admit she had been lying earlier. By allowing herself to be hypnotized, she can tell the police what she knows but claim that she only remembered it while hypnotized

Chowchilla Case

illustrates an occasionally productive use of hypnosis in the legal system: to uncover or develop information that can facilitate investigation of a crime. When there is little physical evidence to point investigators in the right direction, it may sometimes be useful to hypnotize a witness to see if new information can be uncovered. For example, if a witness recalls a license plate under hypnosis, it may lead to the discovery of more reliable physical evidence

Another reason why confidence is sometimes a misleading indicator of accuracy is that confidence is likely to ________________________

increase over time

If these self-reports have been corrupted by the use of suggestive questioning and identification procedures, they will be misleading indicators of eyewitness accuracy. Ironically, in many cases, the same biased procedures that led to a mistaken identification will also lead to

inflated estimates of attention, view, and certainty

Errors in memory can occur at each stage of the process. First,

information might not be well encoded. -Information streams by us each day, and we attend to and encode only a small fraction of that information. Even when we do make an effort to pay attention, our attention sometimes lapses, and crucial information does not get stored. Encoding is imperfect. What we do store in memory is a selective, inexact replica of what we actually heard or saw.

Under the right conditions when the lineup is well constructed and the investigators do not ask leading questions—an eyewitness's ____________________________________________________ indicator of accuracy

initial expression of high confidence in an identification is a strong -However, confidence may be a misleading indicator of accuracy if the lineup is poorly constructed or if the witness is exposed to biasing information

A final problem is that once an event is vividly imagined under hypnosis, a witness may become confident that the memory is true (a phenomenon known as "___________________________").

memory hardening

The biochemical representation of our experience in the brain.

memory trace

To test whether a lineup is biased, a "_______________________" procedure can be used. how?

mock witness Mock witnesses are people who did not see the crime. Each mock witness is given the eyewitness's verbal description of the culprit. For a six-person lineup, if more than 2 out of 12 mock witnesses can pick out the suspect, it is probably a biased lineup. If, for example, 5 out of 12 mock witnesses identify the suspect, it means that identification is not a result of true recognition, but of mere similarity to the verbal description

Other research has found that crime details that are not consistent with preexisting scripts are _____________________________

more readily forgotten over time

research on people who have been convicted of crimes but are later proven innocent has revealed that mistaken eyewitness identification leads to ____________________________________________

more wrongful convictions than any other type of evidence

Which two criteria are difficult to evaluate

opportunity to view the perpetrator and level of attention

Retrieving memories of sweatshirts made it more difficult to recall aspects of the scene (or event) about which no questions were initially asked. Selectively retrieving only some aspects of a scene inhibits recall of other aspects (MacLeod & Saunders, 2008). This phenomenon is called _________________________________

retrieval inhibition

What we expect to see influences what we actually see and how we remember what we see. One form of expectation is what social scientists call __________

scripts

A meta-analysis of 39 studies found that own-race identifications were __________________________ to be correct than cross-race identifications, and that the number of misidentifications (false positives) was _________________________ among cross racial identifications

significantly more likely significantly higher

Problem with Cross-Racial Identifications

some people find it hard to identify someone of another race.

A metaanalysis of 17 studies found that biased lineups (those with fillers who do not closely resemble the real culprit) led to _________________________________________________________

substantially higher rates of innocent suspect identifications

However, a leading researcher has argued that social scientists interested in eyewitness identification ought to focus on _______________________

system variables

People v. Shirley (1982)

the California supreme court excluded all testimony about memories that emerged through the use of hypnosis

Rock v. Arkansas (1987)

the U.S. Supreme Court struck down an Arkansas law that banned all hypnotically refreshed testimony

4. Confidence Ratings

the fourth recommendation is to obtain a clear statement about how confident the witness is that the person identified is the right person. This statement must be taken immediately after the witness identifies the culprit and before any feedback is given to the witness

Finally, even if the memory trace is perfectly preserved in the brain, distortion can occur during ____________________________

the process of retrieval. -We may not have the necessary cues to locate and reinstate an accurate representation of the stored memory

Our memory trace deteriorates with __________________ and is vulnerable to ______________________

time revision and corruption