Social Psychology & the Law

Question 1

Scientific jury selection

Answer 1

the use of social science techniques and expertise to choose favorable juries during a criminal or civil trial.

Question 2

the portion of a trial where potential jurors are questioned about potential biases, and a jury is selected. If jurors are unable to be unbiased, they are sent home.

Answer 2

Voir dire

Question 3

Bias in the criminal justice system

Answer 3

Disparate Treatment: intentionally treating someone differently because of some protected trait (race, sex, religion, nationality, disability, sexual orientation, etc) (more times, you win these cases)

Disparate Impact: a (formally) neutral law/policy affects different groups of people differently because of some protected trait (sex, race, etc) (most categories, you lose)

Question 4

cannot strike jurors based on race

Answer 4

Batson Challenges

Question 5

Confidence =/= accuracy (but note that jurors think that it’s important!)

The more accurate a witness is about details of a crime scene, the less accurate they are about the criminal (again, jurors disagree!)

• Witnesses more likely to identify suspects when the lineup administrator knows which lineup member is the suspect, irrespective of the suspect’s guilt
• Rapid identifications are generally more accurate than slow identification (rapid means rapid, as in, less than 12 seconds!)

Answer 5

Eyewitness testimony

Question 6

Police can lie in interrogation- including about why you’re there or about evident they’ve got on you

Police can take a break and come back. They can keep you for long amounts of time in a small room. They can tell you things will be better if you just admit it.

Answer 6

Police conduct in getting false confessions

Question 7

• Witnessed are less good at identifying people of different races
• High stress worsens memory and encoding
• Disguise

Answer 7

Factors that affect the accuracy of eyewitness testimony

Question 8

eyewitness identification typically are made during a social interaction between a lineup administrator and a witness, an interpersonal context that allows for social influence to affect the decisions made by witnesses

Answer 8

social influence in law

Question 9

when administrators instruct witnesses that they have identified a suspect and they would like them to view a lineup to see whether they can identify that suspect, witnesses are more likely to identify a suspect- irrespective of that suspect’s guilt- than when the administrators warn witnesses that the culprit may or may not be in the lineup

Answer 9

Priming

Question 10

data suggests that racial disparities in mistaken identifications may be better explained by discriminatory policing than memory errors

Answer 10

Base Rate Problems