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Psychology, law and criminal justiceLecture 1 on 25/9: introduction
Legal Psychology/Psychology and Law – differences
Psychology and law are two different entities
Psychology Law
Scientific method (experiment to investigate A priori method (logic, reasoning)
and based on the results of that, it can be
looked at and be seen if it is necessary in law)
Prospective (psychology is future oriented) Retrospective (law is focused on the past to
know what happened there before there will be
a verdict)
Nomothetic (general principles) Idiographic (specific case)
o Difficulty: psychology is general while law is idiographic, the hard thing is that a legal
psychologist has to work with general principles and apply it to a specific case
There are also differences between legal and forensic psychology
Legal psychology Forensic psychology
Based on experimental/cognitive psychology Based on clinical psychology
Empirical and field research Empirical and field research
Examples: memory, eyewitness identification, Examples: personality, PTSD, recidivism
lie detection
Cases with concepts from legal psychology
Collaborative storytelling (Bart de Pauw): when a group of victims starts talking to each
other, their statements will look like each other’s based on the talking
o The event happened so fast sometimes that victims will learn about the (traumatic)
event through each other and base their statements on each other
Reporting after a few years (Weinstein): they can still be reliable if there are no interfering
with the memories (ex. no talking with other victims, …)
o Sometimes it can also happen that someone’s memory is wrong, which can cause
some resistance in the courtroom because the legal psychologist is maybe protecting
the perpetrator
Legal psychologists just want to make sure that somebody doesn’t get a
wrongful conviction
Yet it is a difficult and thin line
Law wants to prevent as much as possible wrongful convictions, it would rather have ten
guilty persons free then one wrongfully convicted
Steve Titus
Most famous case about someone who is wrongfully convicted
Steve was identified by Nancy who was raped
o He was identified thanks to a (suggestive) line-up
It means that there a suggestive indication during the explanation of the line-
up
Steve was convicted but wasn’t the rapist
o Edward Lee King was based on DNA research
Experimental research
Independent variable: manipulated variable (e.g. sleep deprived or not)
Dependent variable: measured variable
Multiple ways of measuring
, o Within-subjects design: the whole group of subjects will get the both variables
Myths in legal psychology (survey)
The mind can unconsciously “block out” memories of traumatic events, this is not true
o There is no scientific evidence for this process
o What people think about when they hear about a repressed memory, it isn’t the
same thing
Vivid memories are not more accurate than vague memories
o Importance in legal psychology: the vividness of a memory doesn’t mean that a
memory is way more accurate than a vague one
There always has to be a bit of doubt
Just like vividness, the emotion in a memory doesn’t mean that the memory is very accurate
o Judges and police are sometimes more likely to believe someone who has many
emotions in their testimony
Dissociative amnesia is a fact that doesn’t exist, just like the blocking out of traumatic
memories
Legal cases in the area of psychology and law
Paul Ingram
An older but very important case
Fall 1988: daughters Ericka and Julie state that they were raped by their father Paul
o Very vivid memories with lots of emotional details
Recovered memories of satanic abuse when they were in therapy
o But the Ingram family was already in a weird religious community where Satan was
mentioned a lot, he could apparently control minds
Paul doesn’t have any memories of it but he believed that his children would never lie and he
suddenly “recovered” the memories of the abuse
o Also memories of satanic rituals like murdering 25 babies
There should be evidence for this but there wasn’t any
Psychologist Ofshe stated that the memories are false and wanted to prove this (in quite an
unethical way)
o The psychologist had a meeting with Paul and falsely suggested to Ingram that he
also forced his kids to have incest with each other
He suggested this to show how easily somebody can be influenced by
suggestion
Paul provided a full (false) account with lots of details
Very unique case about false memory and false confession
o Started a wave of research about repressed memories
Central Park joggers case
A group of young men got convicted for a crime they did not commit
Trisha Meili got raped in Central Park, at that moment there were a lot of young African
American men in the park
o The police linked the crime with this group of young men
o They confessed and were imprisoned for 5 – 15 years
The prosecutor knew the 5 men were innocent
They found DNA evidence that linked to someone else, Matias Reyes was the perpetrator
and confessed in 2002
o There was already a lot of damage done to the men who were imprisoned, they have
disorders like depression
Innocence Project
, Project that looks at the innocent conviction of people
A brief history
History of psychology and law
There is not 1 clear line of history and psychology and law
Often started as the “Psychology of Testimony”
o Many years ago, people were already wondering how reliable witnesses sometimes
are
o They doubted this already in the 5th century before Christ, a Greek scholar concluded
that the testimony of a witness isn’t always correct
Münsterberg wrote a lot about it but was often criticized
o Even though there is a lot of criticism, it is still a huge influence
Stern introduced in 1901 the psychology of eye witnesses
o Researchers got interested in these topics because of their influence on each other
o Introduced as one of the first the drama experiment/reality experiment (staged
event)
After a staged event, the researcher asks a testimony and there can be many
differences between the testimonies of multiple eye witnesses
o His work was often experimental and is still relevant
He stated that children should be questioned as soon as possible, in an
anxiety free environment and individually
Binet wrote La Suggestibilité that was linked to the work of Stern
Legal psychology developments drop because of WW II, Stern was Jewish and couldn’t teach
other researchers/students
Toch was the editor of one of the review books entitled “Legal and Criminal Psychology”
(1961)
o A different term for legal psychology but it is still the same
Eysenck was one of the first who wrote on Crime and Psychology
o Is more forensic related
Belgium and The Netherlands also had an important role
o Varendonck: children are susceptible to suggestion (1911)
o Van Geuns: drugs can affect testimonies (1914)
Shows how it can be an uprise years later
Lecture 2 on 2/10: validity and reliability part 1
Data on slides about wrongful convictions and the reason: the data that is shown adds up to
more than 100% because there are sometimes multiple factors in one case
Validity and reliability
Reliability: are the memories of a witness true
o Don’t see it in the scientific way, that is about how consistent a test is
o This term will be used a lot in the courtroom
Validity: has to be seen in the scientific way, where it is about the way that the test measures
what it wants to test
Beside reliability and validity there are three other concepts
o Consistency: there will be details added on a later time
In the courtroom they easily think that an inconsistent testimony is a false
testimony
Inconsistent statements are not by definition inaccurate
, There are sometimes improvements which provide a better
testimony
o Accuracy: do the details of the testimony of a person refer to what he really
experienced
The details have to be compared to actual evidence like video and audio
material
In many cases there won’t be evidence like that, so need to rely on other
concepts
o Completeness: the amount of details that a testimony has
Isn’t an indication about how good the testimony is
Incomplete statements can be accurate
There don’t have to be many details when the details that are said
are very well known and remembered
o It can be seen in testimonies of children
Consistency doesn’t hang together with accuracy
o In the courtroom there will be easily thought that the testimony is false for the
wrong reason
o There is an exception where inconsistency actually means accuracy
Example: 1 witness gives two testimonies
Testimony 1: I saw a bike
Testimony 2: I saw a car
Experiment 1
Watching a video about a bag getting stolen
Change blindness: people are blind to subtle changes in the environment
o Tells something about how the memory works
Experiment 2
Remember words
False memory: there can develop a false memory when remembering a lot of accurate things
that hang together with it
Experiment 3
False memory: seeing things that are not there
The function/operation of memory
For each memory there happen three stages
o Encoding: the memory is entering your brain
There has to be enough attention
o Consolidation/storage: the memory will be stored if worked with it enough
Works best with repetition or imagination
o Retrieval: if a memory is really created, it can be retrieved
If a memory is retrieved more, it will be remembered better
Free recall is very important when interviewing witnesses
There are two memory systems
o Working memory: where incoming information will be consolidated
Phonological loop: where goes the
o Long term memory: stored memories and are important in the legal area
Explicit memory: memories with conscious recall
Episodic memory: events you have experienced
Semantic memory: general knowledge, facts
Implicit memory: memories without conscious recall
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