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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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Lecture notes – Legal PsychologyLecture 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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