Module 3: Social Psychology and the Law

Question 1

the Canadian justice system consists of ___ and ___ laws

Answer 1

criminal and civil law

Question 2

the most common cause of an innocent person’s conviction

Answer 2

erroneous eyewitness

Question 3

T/F: jurors doubt eyewitness

Answer 3

false. juror tend to overestimate the accuracy of eyewitnesses

Question 4

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

Answer 4

true.

Question 5

3 stages of memory processing

Answer 5

1. acquisition
2. storage
3. retrieval

Question 6

T/F: 100% of the environment during the event is encoded during acquisition

Answer 6

false. Because people cannot perceive

everything that is happening around them, they acquire only a subset of the information available in the environment.

Question 7

factors that limit the amount of information about a crime e that people take in during acquisition

Answer 7

1. how much time they have to watch an event
2. the nature of the viewing conditions.
3. people see what they expect to see
4. focus on weapons (rather than the suspect’s features)
5. own race bias
6. change blindness

Question 8

sources of error during storage

Answer 8

1. misleading questions

2. source monitoring errors

Question 9

sources of error during retrieval

Answer 9

1. “best guess” problem in lineup identification.

2. negative effects of verbalization.

Question 10

T/F: The more stress people are under, the worse their memory for people involved in
and the details of a crime

Answer 10

true.

Question 11

own race bias

Answer 11

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)

Question 12

why does own race bias occur?

Answer 12

1. 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

2. 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.

Question 13

T/F own race bias starts when your an adule

Answer 13

false. they are evident at an early age. even the youngest children still showed own-race bias

Question 14

reconstructive memory

Answer 14

the process by which memories of an event become distorted by information encountered after the event has occurred.

Question 15

people are especially likely to incorporate misinformation into their memories when the event they have withnessed:

Answer 15

produces a negative emotion.

Question 16

source monitoring

Answer 16

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.

Question 17

T/F: lineups have a higher success rate than showing only one other person with the suspect

Answer 17

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

Question 18

best way to create a line up

Answer 18

1. ensure that everyone in the lineup resembles the witness description of the suspect.
2. 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
3. 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
4. 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
5. 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
6. 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
7. 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
8. 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