Social Psychology in the Court

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Social Psychology in the Court
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Announcements

• Want to look over your exam? See Elizabeth during
  office hours (MW 10-12, UH 6506) or make an
  appointment
• Interested in research on childrens eyewitness
  testimony? Contact Dr. London (kamala.london_at_utole
  do.edu) to see if you can help in her lab!

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Social Psychology in the Court

• Just how accurate is eyewitness testimony?

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Three Stages of Memory

• Acquisition/encoding the process by which people
  notice and attend to information in the
  environment
• Storage how information is stored and organized
  in memory
• Retrieval the process by which people recall the
  information stored in memory

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Stage 1 Problems with Acquisition

• What influences the information people encode
  during a crime?
• Arousal effects (salience effect) arousal
  increases memory for salient details and
  decreases memory for less noticeable details
• Weapon focus
• Own race bias

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Stage 1 Problems with Acquisition

• Expectancy effects
• Poor conditions
• Conclusion? We cant remember it if we dont
  encode it and often we dont even encode the
  information!

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Stage 2 Two Models of Memory Storage

• Videotape Recorder Model people store an exact
  memory of events
• Reconstructive Memory Model people construct the
  memory when asked
• Evidence favors the reconstructive model!

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Stage 2 Problems with Storage

• The power of leading questions (Loftus)
• stop sign vs. yield sign study
• contact vs. smashed study
• Misinformation effect misleading information
  after the event may influence our memory of the
  event

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Stage 2 Problems with Storage

• Why does this occur?
• Source Monitoring Problem people fail to
  remember the source of information, allowing
  post-event misleading information to blend into
  memory of event
• After much repetition, info is stored and source
  is forgotten
• Apply to justice system

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Stage 2 Problems with Storage

• Suggestibility of children Mousetrap study
• 58 had false memory of mousetrap
• Suggestibility of childhood memories
• 20 of adults had false memory
• Evidence for recovered memories
• May just be result of leading questions

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Stage 2 Problems with Storage

• Conclusion
• Everything we remember may not have actually
  happened
• Also, gives tremendous power to the questioner
• How can we get the most accurate memories? Avoid
  leading questions!
• Was the subject wearing a blue shirt? vs. what
  was the subject wearing?

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Stage 3 Problems with Retrieval

• Forced Choice Problem if people are pressured to
  make a choice (choose the suspect from a line up)
  they will make a choice even if they have no
  memory to support it and later will remember the
  choice as an actual event.
• Studies of blank line-ups

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How do we decide when people are accurate
eyewitnesses?

• Confident witnesses are NOT more accurate!
• Why?
• Social pressure to be confident
• Repetition of testimony leads to confidence
• Some people just speak more confidently
• Conclusion we simply cant tell when people are
  accurate!

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Do juries attend to eyewitnesses?

• Juries far more likely to convict if there is an
  eyewitness
• 18 if no eyewitness
• 72 if eyewitness present
• Can juries tell who is accurate? NO!
• Juries assume more specific details more
  accurate
• BUT
• More specific details less accuracy about
  important things!

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Do juries attend to eyewitnesses?

• What if we tell juries to ignore eyewitness
  testimony?
• Perseverance bias
• Discredited eyewitness is better than no
  eyewitness
• When told no glasses, 68 still convicted based
  on testimony