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Lecture Notes - Legal Psychology (FSWP-K-3-6)

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Notes on all the lectures of the elective Legal Psychology :)

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  • October 22, 2024
  • 56
  • 2023/2024
  • Class notes
  • Melissa de roos
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Lecture notes – Legal Psychology
Lecture 1 - Introduction
Introduction & course overview
deroos@essb.nl
Assignment and peer feedback

Literature
 Never specific, numeric findings
 Never the name of authors
 No analyses
 Understand results, don't remember them
 Never specifics about method > methodological differences
Skim results
Read discussion

Sample case
Psychological issues
 Preconceptions
 Biases
 Media portrayal
 Wrongness admission
 How is expert testimony perceived
 How persuasive does evidence need to be?
 How do individual jury characteristics affect this threshold?
 What does (false) imprisonment do to people?
 What is the likelihood of a false confession?
 How do we minimize this likelihood?
 How do police decide who and what to follow up on?
 How effective are line-ups?

Different levels of application
Prevention
 Targeted or general
Consulting
 Policy
 Best practice
Intervention
 Community
 Prison
 Victim services

What is crime
Definitions are socially constructed
 Changes with time
 Changes with location/culture
 Exceptions
 Like self-defence

Key concerns
Security
 Keeping the state and the individual safe
 Also places, data and goods

,Control of offenders, substances and crime
 Offenders in prison and community
Risk: assess risk to reduce or manage identified dangers

Risk assessment
Who should be prioritised
 What should be a crim and what can be tolerated
Specific risk assessments
 Domestic abuse, child abuse, sex offenders, becoming a victim, terrorism
Given limited resources, we must focus on high risk areas that have detrimental
consequences

Two distinct priorities
Criminal justice system
 Priority: reduce offending
 Protect: society
Forensic mental health
 Priority: individual well-being
 Protect: individual

The curious case of punishment
What is the goal of punishment
 Retribution, incapacitation/prevention, deterrence
Punishment is not a deterrence
 Traumatic brain injury
 Traumatic experiences
 Releasing people to unchanged circumstances
 Do people know the law and punishments
 Do people care about the during a crime

Rule of law
No one is above the law
By extension, everyone is entitled to due process
 Presumed innocent until proven guilty
 Law written and applied without discrimination
 Universal law enforcement
Is no one above the law, really?
 Sovereign immunity
 Diplomatic immunity
 Public interest immunity to police informers
 Matters related to national security

Additional definitions
Mens rea: state of mind
 What was the intention
 Was it reckless or intentional
 Negligence?
Actus reus: the event, act, omission

Mental health and criminal responsibility
Specific law and its application varies by country/territory
In NL
 At the time of offence, developmental delay or mental disorder
 Causal link between delay/disorder and commission of offence

,  Defendant cannot be held accountable for offence because of the
delay/disorder
TBS - criminal commitment
Diminished responsibility > lower sentence


Lecture 2 - Eyewitness Memory
Memory basics




Working memory holds information for 20-30 seconds
 If you're repeating information it stays longer
Long-term memory has no (time) limit


Misconceptions
 Memory is not like a camera > you cannot rewind




Memory as trace evidence
 After a crime is committed, there may be traces
 DNA, fingerprints
 In case of an eyewitness, a similar trace is left in the brain
 Memory trace
 Forensic evidence collected following strict protocols to avoid
contamination

,  To collect memory, no such protocols exist, usually done by people who
aren't memory experts
 A lot of errors come from how memory is collected

Key factors
 System variables: anything the justice system could control for
 How do we conduct a line up
 What kind of mistakes shouldn't we make
 Anything to do with protocol
 Estimator variable: anything else
 Characteristics of the event, witness, testimony
 Witness can count as victim as well
 Ability of testimony evaluators

Witness characteristics
 No effect of gender
 Women more likely to attempt identification (Line-up)
 Women want to be helpful so they pick someone out
 Very old and very young do worse
 If suspect not present
 They are likely to pick someone if suspect isn't there
 No effect of intelligence
 No effect of race
 People are better at identifying someone of their own race
 Not much research on personality characteristics or personality theory

Cross-race effect
Cross-race effect: We remember faces better of the same race/ethnicity
 Own-race faces were 1.40 times more likely to be correctly identified and
1.56 times less likely to be falsely identified than were other-race faces
 Own-race is more correctly identified and less falsely identified
Not only black and white races
Effect becomes less strong as encoding time increases
Possible explanations
 Less exposure to and interaction with racial minorities (utilitarian
hypothesis)
 Less attention paid to other races (cognitive disregard)
 Focus on characteristics that are helpful for identification of same race
faces but not with other-race faces (perceptual expertise hypothesis)
 Different cognitive processing (depth of processing may vary)
 Representational system may be optimal for identifying same-race faces
You need meaningful interactions with the race

Event characteristics
 Distinctive faces
 Highly (un)attractive > easier to identify
 Any simple disguise creates problems
 Natural aging
 Time the person is visible > attention given is more important

Testimony characteristics
 Confidence of the eyewitness; depends on accuracy
 Reflecting on encoding conditions helps improve relationship
between accuracy and confidence

,  Repeated testing increases confidence but not accuracy
 Accurate identification tends to be quicker than misidentifications
 Identification in < 10-12 seconds 90% accuracy
 Quick identification prevents intentional deliberation and relative
judgement

System variables
 How line-ups are conducted
 Instructions: don't suggest that the right person is going to be there
 Fairness
 Double-blind: witness shouldn't know who the police suspects most
 Expert witness testimony on eyewitness memory
 Tackle overestimation of accuracy

Memory as malleable
Elizabeth loftus
45 participants were randomly assigned to watch different videos of a car
accident, in which separate videos had shown collisions at 20 miles per hour, 30
miles per hour, and 40 miles per hour.
 "About how fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?“
 “About how fast were the cars going when they bumped/collided with each
other
 Use of the word “smash” produced higher estimates of speed.
“Was there any broken glass?”
 “smash” produced higher affirmative responses even though there was no
glass in the video

Misinformation effect
The misinformation effect: experimental and real-world instances in which
misleading information is incorporated into an account of an historical event
Sample study
 Subjects shown one of two different series of slides showing a student at
the bookstore. One version of the slides would show a screwdriver while
the other would show a wrench. Audio narrative accompanying the slides
would only refer to the object as a "tool"
 Subjects would read a description of the slides, except this time a specific
tool was named, which would be the incorrect tool half the time.
 Subjects had to list five examples of specific types of objects, such as
tools, but were told to only list examples which they had not seen in the
slides.
Subjects who had read an incorrect narrative were far less likely to list the
written object (which they hadn't actually seen) than the control subjects (28%
vs. 43%), and were far more likely to incorrectly list the item which they had
actually seen (33% vs. 26%).

, Existing memories can be distorted when exposed to misleading information
 Retroactive interference: Information after the fact distorts memory
Post-warnings used to reduce or eliminate the effect
 Specificity
 Enlightenment
 Social discrediting of the misinformation source

False memories & imagination inflation
Remembering the Bijlmer disaster
 55% remembers seeing footage, but that footage didn't exist
Same with 9/11
 Suggesting causes people to remember things that don't exist
Ireland abortion referendum
Own political ideas/biases have effect on what you remember (even when it
never happened)

Imagination inflation (Li et.al., 2020)
Imagination inflation: Imagining an event creates a false memory for that event
 Mere exposure can lead to imagination inflation, which makes research
trickly
Non-believed memory
 Having a memory that is later on challenged, memory is there but you
don't believe it happened

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