Module 3: Social Psychology and the Law Flashcards
the Canadian justice system consists of ___ and ___ laws
criminal and civil law
the most common cause of an innocent person’s conviction
erroneous eyewitness
T/F: jurors doubt eyewitness
false. juror tend to overestimate the accuracy of eyewitnesses
T/F: in the U of A study, the more visual information available about the thief, the higher the percentage of students who correctly identified him in the photo lineup
true.
3 stages of memory processing
- acquisition
- storage
- retrieval
T/F: 100% of the environment during the event is encoded during acquisition
false. Because people cannot perceive
everything that is happening around them, they acquire only a subset of the information available in the environment.
factors that limit the amount of information about a crime e that people take in during acquisition
- how much time they have to watch an event
- the nature of the viewing conditions.
- people see what they expect to see
- focus on weapons (rather than the suspect’s features)
- own race bias
- change blindness
sources of error during storage
- misleading questions
2. source monitoring errors
sources of error during retrieval
- “best guess” problem in lineup identification.
2. negative effects of verbalization.
T/F: The more stress people are under, the worse their memory for people involved in
and the details of a crime
true.
own race bias
the finding that people are better at recognizing faces within their own race than those of other races. e/x white people are better at recognizing white faces than black faces)
why does own race bias occur?
- because people have more contactt with members of their own race, allowing them to better learn how to distinguish one individual from another.
not really about race itself: Koreans who grew up in white families had better memory for
white faces, which is consistent with the idea that we are best at remembering faces
that are of the race with which we have the most contact
- when people examine same-race faces,
they pay close attention to individuating features that distinguish that face from others, such as the height of the cheekbones or the contour of the forehead. When people
see the face of a person of another race, they tend to classify the face in terms of race
and stop at that.
T/F own race bias starts when your an adule
false. they are evident at an early age. even the youngest children still showed own-race bias
reconstructive memory
the process by which memories of an event become distorted by information encountered after the event has occurred.
people are especially likely to incorporate misinformation into their memories when the event they have withnessed:
produces a negative emotion.
source monitoring
the process by which people try to identify the source of their memories (problem during storage). In short, when information is stored in memory, it is not always well tagged as to where it came from.
T/F: lineups have a higher success rate than showing only one other person with the suspect
true. if only one person was shown and
that person was innocent, a mistaken identification was four times more likely than when the same person appeared in a six-person lineup. Errors were especially likely if the
innocent person wore clothing similar to that worn by the person who committed the
crime
best way to create a line up
- ensure that everyone in the lineup resembles the witness description of the suspect.
- tell the witnesses that the person suspected of the crime may or may NOT be in the line up.
- If witnesses believe that the culprit is present, they are much more likely to choose the person who looks most like the culprit, rather than saying that they aren’t sure or that the culprit is not present. In short, false
identifications are more likely to occur when people believe that the culprit is in
the lineup - Do not always include the suspect in an initial lineup.
- If a witness picks out someone as the culprit from a lineup that includes only foils (i.e., a blank lineup), you will know the witness is not reliable - make sure that the person conducting the lineup does not known which person in the lineup is the suspect.
- This precaution avoids the possibility that
the person will unintentionally communicate to the witness who the suspect is - Present pictures of people sequentially instead of simultaneously. Doing
so makes it more difficult for witnesses to compare all of the pictures, choosing
the one that most resembles the criminal, even when the criminal is not actually in the lineup - Present witnesses with photographs of people and sound recordings of
their voices. Witnesses who both see and hear members of a lineup are much
more likely to identify the person they saw commit a crime than are people who
only see pictures or only hear voice recordings - don’t use composite face programs.
Sometimes witnesses are asked to reconstruct the face of a suspect, using computer programs that are designed for this
purpose. Typically, the faces that witnesses generate with these programs do not
look much like the actual suspect. Even worse, research shows that people who
generate faces with these programs actually have a worse memory for the suspect
than people who did not - Try to minimize the time between the crime and the identification of
suspects. have found that the longer the time that elapses between when witnesses
see a suspect and when they are asked to identify the person from a lineup, the
greater the likelihood of error