Tets 2: psych 230 Flashcards
Midterm
What are some requirements and demands of police officers?
- Multiple and diverse tasks
- Knowledge of the law and act lawfully
- Promote a positive image
- Bureaucratic and personal stress
Lefkowiz (1975)
- research whether police officers are different from general population and how
- found no differences in psychological disorders or intelligence
Wooten and Brown
found “cop culture” values
What are the 3 clusters of common traits between police officers?
cluster 1: physical courage, self-assertiveness, pragmatism, mission, action
Cluster 2: Suspicion, cynicism, pessimism, secretiveness, loyalty, solidarity
Cluster 3: conservation, authoritarianism, prejudice
Cluster 1
- face difficulty seeing people who violate laws, and seeing victims
- run risk of feeling entitled
Cluster 2
- feelings of isolation, being different, feeling misunderstood
- negative views of offenders especially males (less trustworthy, more deviant)
- strong loyalty within each other
Cluster 3
conservatism, authoritarinism, prejudice
values and the policing career
- desire to provide social services to others
- preference for order and security
lewis terman and stanford-binet test
- terman tested intelligence of 30 officers and this test resulted in recommended 80 IQ score as a minimum for future applicants
Police selection research in canada
- RCMP police aptitude tests
- six factor personality questionnaire
- range of cognitive ability and personality tests in their selection
Developing Police selection instruments
there are 2 stages in development:
1. job analysis stage (knowledge, skills, abilities)
2. Construction & validation stage
conducting job analysis
- involves procedure to identify and define relevant Knowledge skills and abilites (KSA)
- organizational psychologist working in conjunction with a police agency may conduct the job analysis
- these psychologists could use a range of techniques for identifying relevant KSAs like survey methods and observational techs
What is predictive validity?
the extent to which scores on test a predict scores on some other measure
- tells us if there is relationship between scores obtained from a selection of instruments and measures of actual job performance
what are some problems with job analysis?
- the KSAs of a good police officer may not be
- difference types of police officers will be characterized by different KSA
- individuals may disagree over which KSAs are important can be challenge when trying to decide which KSAs are important
Psychological tests used in police selection
- hirish, northrop & schmidt (1986) found average validity coefficiants of 0.36 and 0.13 for prediciting training success and on-the-job performance
- Aamodt (2004) found validity coefficients of 0.41 and 0.16
how can you determine an instruments predictive validity via number
- they indicate the strength and direction of the relationship between the scores on selection instruments and the ratings of job performance
- close to +1.00 means very strong positive relationships
- close to -1.00 means a very strong negative relationship exists
Core assumptions of profiling
- Criminal behavior is subject to the same set “grand laws” of human behavior to which noncriminal behavior is subject
- Profiling is psychological (attributional) task
Profiling Equation
B= f(P.E) where E=(V+C)
B - offender behavior
P - offender characteristics (person)
E - environment
V - victim
C - context
Profiling is solving for P
What is the problem of distortion?
you can make mistakes at every point
- evidence collection
interpretive biases
Personality tests used in police selection
- Minnesota Multiphasic personality inventory (MMPI)
- Inwald Personlity inventory (IPI)
What is one probable source of bias (in profiling discussed in class?
victim vs perpetrator characteristics
top victim characteristics:
- weak/helpless/vulerable
-innocent
-female
-small
top prepetrator characteristics:
- male
- aggressive/mean/violent
- poor
- mentally ill
What are core profiling tasks?
C - “context”: physical, demographic, repetitional
V - “victim”: why them? why there? why now?
B - “behavior”: why?
M.O - modus operandi: personations / signatures? staging? duress? habit?
What are some core profiling challenges?
- offenders lie
- apprehended v. unapprehended
- validate victimology of deceased?
- tradtional research goal vs profiling goal
- eg gender and physical aggression
- egos, ignorance, distrust, and hype
What are sources of investigator bias?
- values and general worldview
- very trusting people, competitve people
- personality characteristics
- prejudice and stereotypes
- specific prior expectations
- goals for the interview
Interviewees and goals
witnesses | information: interview (congruent)
witnesses | confession: interrogation
suspects | information: interview (incongruent)
Suspects | confession: interrogation (congruent)
What are the steps in the reid technique?
- Positive confrontation
- here’s the evidence, tell us what happened/tell us why you did this? - Theme development
- try to shift the blame from suspect to someone else, or something else –> what made you do this? - Handling denials
- discourage suspect from doing this, if they deny its harder to get a confession - Overcoming Objections
- take a reasoning they give for not being able to do something and twist it - Procure and retain suspect’s attention
- reinforce sincerity, keep their attention - Handling the suspect’s passive mood
- if suspect cries, infer guilt - Pose the “alternative question”
- give a socially acceptable explanation and a less socially acceptable explanation - Detail the offence
- Oral and Written statements
What are some sources of interviewee bias?
- memory accuracy: not as good as we think they are
- personality characteristics
- conformity (compliance, identification, internalization)
- obedience
- anxiety level
- voluntary deception (lying)
Lie detection
- lying is when a person intends to mislead someone
- leakage hypothesis
- signs that someone is lying - non verbal cues
- polgyraph, guilty knowledge test, statment analysis, voice analysis, non-verbal behavior, facial blood flow, brain scan
What are some types of false confession?
- voluntary confession
- coerced compliant confession - think they’re innocent, but give in and confess
- coerced internalized - maybe I did do it: unclear recollection, drinking heavily
what are 5 ways to put innocent people at risk?
- “I do not want to interrogate innocent people”
- Waiving rights - more likley when innocent - “im innocent, i don’t need anyone to defend me”
- higher pressure interrogation if denying guilt
- use questionable interrogation techniques
- “i’d know a false confession if I saw one”
What are the steps in the PEACE interrogation method?
- Preparation a planning
- Engage and explain
- account
- closure
- evaluate
what are some areas where police discretion is used?
- how police interact with young offenders
- how police intervene in cases of domestic violence
- how police deal with mentally ill individuals
- how police make decision in use of force encounters
what are the sources of police stress?
- occupational stressors
- organizational stressors
criminal justice system stressors - public stressors
What are some methods for obtaining interview accuracy?
- rapport
- free and open recall
- non-leading ways to enhance recall
- activate/probe images
- change perspectives
- reverse order
what is police discretion?
freedom that police officer often has for deciding what should be done
what is an assessment centre?
- facility in which behavior of police applicants can be observed in situations with multiple observers
What are the 3 options police officers have when they encounter an individual with mental illness?
- transport that person to psychiatric institution
- arrest the person and take them to jail
- resolve the matter informally
what are methods for controlling police discretion?
- departmental policies
- use of force models
What are occupational stressors?
stressors relating to the job itself
what are organizational stressors?
- police researchers believe that this affects police officers more
preventing & managing police stress
- infromal support network
- physical fitness programs
- professional counselling services
- family assistance programs
- special assessments following exposure to critical events
what is resiliency training?
- improves ability to effectively adapt to stress and adversity
- done through psycho-education about psychological and physiological aspects of extreme stress and potential trauma
psychological debriefings
- psychologically oriented police intervention delivered after exposure to a psychologically distressing event
- group or individual meetings to help mitigate emotional distress
What are some consequences of police stress?
- physical health problems
- psychological & personal problems
- job performance problems
What is the reid model?
- nine step model of interrogation used to extract confessions from suspects
- relies on psychologically based tactics that make consequences of confessing more desirable than anxiety related to deception
What are minimization techniques?
soft sell tactics used by police interrogators that are designed to lull the suspect into a false sense of security
what are maximization techniques?
scare tactics used by police interrogators that are designed to intimidate suspect believed to be guilty
what is a disputed confession?
a confession that is later disputed at trial
what are the key points of kassin and kiechel’s study
- tested whether individuals would “confess” to a crime they had not committed
- findings suggest it is possible to demonstrate under lab conditions that people can admit to acts they are not responsible for
What are some reasons why Kassin and Kiechel’s findings can’t be generalized to actual police interrogations?
- the participants had nothing to lose, real suspects have much to lose
- all participants were actually innocent, not all suspects are
- the participants could be confused about their guilt (accidentally hitting ‘alt’), real suspects typically are not
What are key points from shaw & porter’s research
- convinced uni students they committed crimes as teenagers which they did not commited, they even confessed
- 71 % developed false memory of the crime
- many participants recount events surrounding the crime with concrete and vivid details
What are the 3 reasons why false confessions are likely to be viewed as evidence of guilt by potential jurors highlighted by Appleby, Hasel and Kassin (2013)?
- based purely on common sense: jurors unlikely to believe that a person would be willing to make statements that counter self-interest
- people unable to accurately distinguish between true and false confessions
- false confessions are often similar to true confessions - they contain specific visual and auditory details concerning the crime and victims as well as references to confessor’s thoughts, feelings, and motives during and after committing the crime
what is criminal profiling
a technique for identifying the major personality and behavioural characteristics of an individual based upon an analysis of the crimes they have committed
orgins of criminal profiling: the FBI
- first time profiles were produced in a systematic way by a law enforcement agency and training provided to construct criminal profiles
What is ViCLAS
the violent crime linkage analysis system, which was developed by the RCMP to collect and analyze info on serious crimes from across Canada
what is confabulation?
reporting events that never actually occurred
Linkage Blindness
inability on part of the police to link geographically dispersed serial crimes committed by same offender because of lack of information sharing among police agencies
Investigate psychology
- made by david carter
- he drew knowledge of human behavior that he had gained as academic psychologist
what is deductive criminal profiling?
profiling the background characteristics of unknown offender based on evidence left at crime scenes by a offender
what is inductive criminal profiling?
profiling background characteristics of unknown offender base on what they know about other solved cases
what is the organized-disorganized model?
model used by FBI which assumes crime scenes and backgrounds of serial offenders which can be categorized as organized or disorganized
what are the 4 cluster used to identify different ways sex offenders select their victims (location)?
- Hunters: seek out victims close to their homes
- poachers: travel long distances to find their victims
- trollers: encounter victims during regular routine
- trappers: put themselves in situations where they have access to preferred victim’s (eg. via jobs)
What are the 3 clusters used to identify different ways sex offenders select their victims (appearance)?
- Telio specific: target mostly adult females with specific features
- pedo/hebe specific: target children/adolescent victims with specific features
- non-specific: don’t appear to have a type
What are the 3 clusters used to identify different ways sex offenders approach their victims?
- Opportunistic cons/tricksters: use ruse to approach
- home intruders: forces their way into the home
- non-violent persuasion: strategies like gift giving to get closer to familiar victims
What are the 3 clusters used to identify different ways sex offenders assault their victim?
- violence and control: verbal & physical force
- attempt: use very little physical force
- persuasion and sexual: persuasive tactics & lots of attention on sexual acts
What are some critiques about the validity of criminal profiling?
- lacks strong empirical support
- core psychological assumptions underlying profiling currently lacks strong empirical support
- many profiles contain info that is vague / ambiguous which can potentially fit many suspects
- professionals may be no better than untrained at constructing accurate profiles
What is the classic trait model?
model of personality which assumes primary determinants of behaviour are stable, internal tarits
What is geographic profiling?
technique that uses crime scene locations to predict most likely area where offender resides
what are geographic profiling systems?
computer systems use mathematical models of offender spatial behaviour to make predictions about where unknown serial offenders reside
What is a polygraph?
device for recording individuals autonomic nervous system responses
- amount of sweat on skin measures, heart rate too
In what cases are polygraph tests used?
- police asks suspect/victim to take it
- insurance companies verify claims
- uncover offenders history
Types of polygraph tests
- comparison question test (CQT)
- concealed information test (CIT)
What are the steps involved in doing a polygraph test on a crime suspect?
- gather info
- pre-interview
- attach sensors and conduits acquaintance test
- testing phase
- scoring phase
- post-test interview
Comparison Question Test (CQT)
- test includes neutral questions unrelated to crime
- tests relevant questions concerning crime
- comparison questions concerning persons honesty and past history. priori to event
Concealed Information Test (CIT)
type of polygraph designed to determine if person knows details about crime
ground truth
the knowledge of whether the person is actually guilty or innocent
What are some countermeasures to beating the polygraph?
physical countermeasures:
- biting their tongue
- pressing toes on the floor
Mental countermeasures:
- counting backwards by 7 from a number greater than 200
what is conversion disorder?
a person experiences very specific genuine physical symptoms for which no psychological basis can be found
What is factitious disorder?
- person feigns or induces physical symptoms
- assuming the role of a sick person
What is Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy?
person intentionally produces illness in their child
what is malingering?
intentionally faking psychological pr physical symptoms for some typer of external gain
