Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc. Social Psychology in Action...

Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc.

Social Psychology in Social Psychology in Action 3Action 3

Social Psychology in Social Psychology in Action 3Action 3

Social Psychology Social Psychology and the Lawand the Law


PowerPoint Presentation

Prepared By

Fred W. Whitford

Montana State University


Chapter OutlineChapter Outline

I. Eyewitness Testimony


Eyewitness TestimonyEyewitness Testimony

The American legal system assigns a great deal of significance to eyewitness testimony.



Experiments confirm that jurors rely heavily on evidence based on eyewitness testimony; unfortunately, jurors overestimate the accuracy of eyewitnesses.



• Why Are Eyewitnesses Often Wrong?In order for someone to be an accurate eyewitness, they must complete successfully three stages of memory processing, acquisition, or noticing and attending to the information, storage, or storing the information in memory, and retrieval, or recalling the information stored in their memories.



• Why Are Eyewitnesses Often Wrong?

Only a subset of the information available at one phase makes it to the next stage in the process; eyewitnesses can be inaccurate because of problems at any stage.



• Why Are Eyewitnesses Often Wrong?For example, familiarity can influence what information enters during the acquisition stage of memory processing. For this reason, the consequences of the own-race bias, the finding that people are better at recognizing faces of their own race than those of other races, must be considered in legal cases.




Both reconstructive memory and source monitoring can interfere with the accurate storage of memories. Reconstructive memory is the process whereby memories for an event become distorted by information encountered after the event has occurred. Source monitoring is the process whereby people try to identify the source of their memories.



• Why Are Eyewitnesses Often Wrong?To assist the retrieval process, social psychologists recommend that police follow certain steps when conducting a police lineup.



• Judging Whether Eyewitnesses Are Mistaken

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the amount of confidence witnesses exhibit is a good indicator of their accuracy.




However, studies have shown that confidence and accuracy are not strongly related.




This occurs because the things that influence people’s confidence are not necessarily the same things that influence their accuracy.



• Judging Whether Eyewitnesses Are Lying

Another reason the testimony of eyewitnesses may be inaccurate is that witnesses may deliberately lie.




Studies examining people’s ability to detect deception find that most people’s ability is only slightly better than chance.




The polygraph is a machine that measures people’s physiological responses (for example, heart rate). Polygraph operators attempt to tell if someone is lying by observing how that person responds physiologically while answering questions.




Systematic reviews of the evidence suggest that the polygraph machine is able to detect lying at better than chance levels but is by no means perfect, misidentifying about 15% as truthful when in fact they are lying, and about 15% as lying when they are in fact telling the truth.



• Can Eyewitness Testimony Be Improved?

Two general approaches have been tried, but neither has proven to be very successful.




The first involves hypnosis, putting a person into a trancelike state. However, there is no hard evidence that people’s memories improve when they are hypnotized, and there is evidence that people under hypnosis are susceptible to suggestion, coming to believe that they saw things that they did not.




The second technique involves a cognitive interview, a technique whereby a trained interviewer tries to improve eyewitnesses’ memories by focusing their attention on the details and context of the event. The cognitive interview may increase errors because people become confused as to whether they actually witnessed an event or simply imagined it.



• The Recovered Memory Debate

Recovered memories are recollections of a past event, that had been forgotten or repressed; a great deal of controversy surrounds the accuracy of such memories.



• The Recovered Memory Debate

Research shows that people can acquire vivid memories of events that never occurred. The false memory syndrome, remembering a past traumatic experience that is objectively false but nevertheless accepted as true, fuels the controversy and debate surrounding recovered memories.



II. Juries: Group Processes in Action


Juries: Group Processes in ActionJuries: Group Processes in Action

The jury tradition is longstanding in English and American law; despite this tradition, the jury system has often come under attack.



Problems can arise at each of three phases of a jury trial: the way in which jurors use information they obtain before the trial begins, the way in which they process information during the trial, and the way in which they deliberate in the jury room.



• Effects of Pretrial Publicity

Information reported by the media before a trial may be inaccurate or biased because most of it comes from the police and the D.A., who have a vested interest in presenting a strong case against the suspect.




Emotional publicity that arouses public passions is the most biasing.




Options used to remedy this problem are the voir dire process (allowing lawyers to question prospective jurors before the trial), and judges instructing jurors to disregard what they have heard before the trial. However, these precautions do not always work.



• How Jurors Process Information During the Trial

Pennington and Hastie (1990) suggest that jurors decide on one story that best explains all the evidence and then try to fit this story to the possible verdicts they are allowed to render.




If one of the verdicts fits their preferred story, they are likely to convict.




This explanation has important implications for how lawyers present their cases. Lawyers present their evidence either in story order or in witness order, saving the most powerful witness for last. The story order has been shown to be more effective and influential.




This suggests that one reason the conviction rate in felony trials in America is so high is that in real trials, prosecutors usually use the story order while defense attorneys usually use the witness order.



• Deliberations in the Jury Room

In real life, in the vast majority of cases, the jury’s final decision will be the same as the one favored by a majority of jurors on the initial vote.



• Deliberations in the Jury Room

However, the process of deliberation makes people consider the evidence more systematically, and minority opinion often does change people’s minds about the extent of guilt.



• Jury Size: Are Twelve Heads Better than Six?

One problem with small juries is that it is less likely that minority members will be represented. Most social psychologists who have conducted research in this area believe that all juries should consist of twelve people.



III. Why Do People Obey the Law?


Why Do People Obey the Law?Why Do People Obey the Law?

• Do Severe Penalties Deter Crime?

Deterrence Theory is the hypothesis that the threat of legal punishment causes people to refrain from criminal activity as long as the punishment is perceived as relatively severe, certain, and swift.



• Do Severe Penalties Deter Crime?

In general, severe penalties will work only when people know what they are, are relatively certain they would be caught, and are able to weigh the implications rationally before deciding to commit a crime.



• Procedural Justice: People’s Sense of Fairness

An important reason that people obey the law is their sense of procedural justice, people’s judgments about the fairness of the procedures used to determine outcomes, such as whether they are innocent or guilty of a crime.


Study QuestionsStudy Questions

What can social psychologists offer to the study of the legal system?



Why do jurors overestimate the accuracy of eyewitness testimony?



What are the three stages of memory processing? What can interfere with processing at each stage of memory? What conditions are present at most crime scenes and how does this affect acquisition?



Why is familiarity an important factor in memory processing? What is the own-race bias? What consequences does this bias have on eyewitness testimony?



What are the characteristics of our memory storage? What is reconstructive memory? What has been discovered about the accuracy of our memory?



What is source monitoring? What effects do misleading questions have on source monitoring? Why is incorrect source monitoring a problem for eyewitness accuracy?



What consequences does retrieval have for the correct identification of a suspect from a police lineup? What are the steps to follow when conducting a police lineup? What is the rationale behind each step?



How can we tell if a witness’ testimony is accurate? Why is confidence not always a good estimate of the accuracy of one’s testimony?



How well can people detect deception? Do those working in the field of law enforcement do better than others at detecting deception?



What is a polygraph machine designed to do and how does it do it? What is the assumption behind the use of the polygraph? How accurate, on average, are polygraphs at detecting when someone is lying?



What methods have been used in the attempt to improve the accuracy of eyewitness testimony? What is a cognitive interview?



What are recovered memories? What is the false memory syndrome? How are they relevant to the issue of eyewitness testimony?



What are three phases of a jury trial in which problems can occur? What are the effects of pretrial publicity on jurors’ perceptions of suspects?



How do individual jurors process evidence during a trial? In which two orders can lawyers present evidence? Which order is more effective?



What are the benefits of jury deliberations? How are minorities influential in jury deliberation?



Why do people obey laws? What explanation does deterrence theory offer? What does this theory fail to explain?



What is procedural justice? How important do people consider it to be?

Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc. Social Psychology in Action...

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Transcript of Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc. Social Psychology in Action...