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