6th edition
Social Psychology
Elliot Aronson
University of California, Santa Cruz
Timothy D. Wilson
University of Virginia
Robin M. Akert
Wellesley College
slides by Travis Langley
Henderson State University
Chapter 16
Social Psychology
and the Law
“No subjective feeling of certainty can
be an objective criterion for the
desired truth.”
— Hugo Münsterberg,
On the Witness Stand, 1908
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.
EYEWITNESS TESTIMONY
• If an eyewitness fingers you as the culprit,
you are quite likely to be convicted, even if
considerable circumstantial evidence
indicates that you are innocent.
• The Innocence Project reports 180 cases in
which DNA evidence exonerated someone
after being convicted of a crime.
• In 75% of these cases, the conviction was
based on faulty eyewitness identification.
EYEWITNESS TESTIMONY
• Jurors and law enforcement professionals
rely heavily on eyewitness testimony
when they are deciding whether someone
is guilty.
• Unfortunately, jurors tend to overestimate
the accuracy of eyewitnesses.
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.
The accuracy of eyewitness identification depends on the viewing
conditions at the time the crime was committed. As in this study,
however, most jurors believe that witnesses can correctly identify
the criminal even when viewing conditions are poor.
Why Are Eyewitnesses Often Wrong?
Our minds are not like video cameras,
which can record an event, store it over
time, and play it back later with perfect
accuracy.
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.
To be an accurate eyewitness, people must complete three stages of
memory processing.
Error may creep in at each of the three stages.
Why Are Eyewitnesses Often Wrong?
When Loftus and Harley (2005) showed
photographs to research participants, they
found that accuracy in identifying the
celebrities began to drop when the
simulated distance exceeded 25 feet.
At 34 feet only 75% of the participants
recognized the face.
At 77 feet, only 25% of the participants did
so.
Why Are Eyewitnesses Often Wrong?
When eyewitnesses are the victims of a crime they
will be terribly afraid, and this alone can make it
difficult to take in everything that is happening.
1. The more stress people are under, the worse their
memory for people involved in and the details of a
crime.
2. Crime victims focus attention mostly on any
weapon they see and less on the suspect’s
features.
If someone points a gun at you, your attention is likely
to be more on the gun than on whether the robber
has blue or brown eyes.
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.
Why Are Eyewitnesses Often Wrong?
• The information people notice and pay
attention to is also influenced by what
they expect to see.
• Research has confirmed that people are
poor at noticing the unexpected.
• Among all the guns in the previous slides,
how many gorillas did you notice?
• The guns may have distracted you, plus
you weren’t expecting gorillas.
Why Are Eyewitnesses Often Wrong?
Even if we notice a person or event we
might not remember it very well, if we are
unfamiliar with it.
Own-Race Bias
The fact that people are better at
recognizing faces of their own
race than those of other races.
Why Are Eyewitnesses Often Wrong?
College students were found to be better at
recognizing faces of people their own age
than faces of middle-aged people.
Middle-aged people were better at
recognizing faces of people their own age
than faces of college students.
Why Are Eyewitnesses Often Wrong?
• There is evidence that when people
examine same-race faces, they pay close
attention to individuating features that
distinguish that face from others.
• When people examine different-race
faces, however, they are drawn more to
features that distinguish that face from
their own race, rather than individuating
features.
Why Are Eyewitnesses Often Wrong?
• There is evidence that when people
examine same-race faces, they pay close
attention to individuating features that
distinguish that face from others.
• When
people
examine
different-race
Because
people
usually
have less
faces,
however, with
they features
are drawn
more to
experience
that
features
that
distinguish
that
face
from
characterize individuals of other
their own race, rather than individuating
races,
they
find
it
more
difficult
to
features.
tell members of that race apart.
Storage
• Memories, like photographs, fade with
age.
• People can get mixed up about where
they heard or saw something; memories
in one “album” can get confused with
memories in another.
• As a result, people can have quite
inaccurate recall about what they saw.
Source of images: Microsoft Office Online.
Storage
Reconstructive Memory
The process whereby memories of an
event become distorted by information
encountered after the event occurred.
Source of images: Microsoft Office Online.
Storage
Elizabeth Loftus showed students thirty
slides depicting different stages of an
automobile accident.
The content of one slide varied:
• Some students saw a car stopped at a
stop sign.
• Others saw the same car stopped at a
yield sign.
Source of images: Microsoft Office Online.
Storage
• If they had seen a stop sign and were
asked about a stop sign, 75% correctly
identified the stop sign photograph. (Note
that 25% made a crucial mistake on what
would seem to be an easy question!)
• However, of those who had received a
misleading question (e.g., asked if they’d
seen a yield sign after shown a stop
sign), only 41 percent chose the correct
photograph.
Source of images: Microsoft Office Online.
Storage
In subsequent experiments, Loftus and her
colleagues found that misleading
questions can change people’s minds
about:
– How fast a car was going
– Whether broken glass was at the scene of an
accident
– Whether a traffic light was green or red
– Whether a robber had a mustache
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.
Storage
Although some controversy exists over the
answer to this question most researchers
endorse the following position:
Misleading questions cause a problem with
source monitoring, the process people use
to try to identify the source of their
memories.
When information gets stored in memory, it is
not always well “tagged” as to where it came
from.
Retrieval
• Identification errors from police lineups are the most
common cause of wrongful convictions in the United
States.
• A number of things other than the image of a person
that is stored in memory can influence whether
eyewitnesses will pick someone out of a lineup.
• Witnesses often choose the person in a lineup who
most resembles the criminal, even if the resemblance is
not very strong.
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.
To avoid the “best guess” problem, where
witnesses pick the person who looks
most like the suspect, psychologists
recommend police follow these steps:
1. Make sure everyone in the lineup resembles the
witness’s description of the suspect.
2. Tell the witnesses that the person suspected of
the crime may or may not be in the lineup.
3. Do not always include the suspect in an initial
lineup.
4. Make sure that the person conducting the lineup
does not know which person in the lineup is the
suspect.
To avoid the “best guess” problem, where
witnesses pick the person who looks
most like the suspect, psychologists
recommend police follow these steps:
5. Ask witnesses how confident they are that they
can identify the suspect before they receive any
feedback about their lineup performance.
6. Present pictures of people sequentially instead
of simultaneously.
7. Present witnesses with both photographs of
people and sound recordings of their voices.
8. Composite face programs should perhaps be
avoided.
Judging Whether Eyewitnesses
Are Mistaken
• Although people are more ready to
believe someone who is confident about a
memory, confidence is not a good
predictor of accuracy.
• Confident identifications by witnesses and
victims have led to convictions of innocent
people, some of whom served many years
before additional evidence exonerated
them.
Why Doesn’t Certainty Mean Accuracy?
The things that influence people’s confidence are
not necessarily the same things that influence
their accuracy.
Example: After identifying a suspect, a person’s
confidence increases if he or she finds out
that other witnesses identified the same
suspect and decreases if he or she finds out
that other witnesses identified a different
suspect.
Responding Quickly
• Accurate witnesses in one study tended to say
that they didn’t really know how they
recognized the man, that his face just “popped
out” at them.
• Inaccurate witnesses tended to say that they
used a process of elimination, deliberately
comparing
one made
face to their
another.
People who
choice within
• Ironically,
taking more
time and thinking
10 seconds
and expressed
very more
carefully about the pictures were associated
high confidence in their judgment
with making more mistakes.
were especially likely to be correct.
The Problem with Verbalization
• Trying to put an image of a face into
words can make people's memory worse.
• After writing that someone had “squinty”
eyes, you look for eyes that are squinty,
and doing so interferes with your attention
to the finer details of the faces.
• If you ever witness a crime, then, you
should not try to put into words what the
criminal looked like.
Judging Whether Witnesses Are Lying
• Even if witnesses have very accurate
memories for what they saw, they might
deliberately lie when on the witness
stand.
• If a witness was lying, why couldn’t the
jurors tell?
• How accurate are people at detecting
deception? Not very, as it turns out.
Judging Whether Witnesses Are Lying
• Interestingly, people with a lot of
experience in dealing with liars (e.g., law
enforcement agents and employees of
the CIA) are no more accurate at
detecting deception than college
students.
• It is harder to detect whether someone is
lying than we might think--even if we are
a seasoned police officer or judge.
Can Polygraph Machines Tell if
People are Lying?
Polygraph
A machine that measures people’s
physiological responses (e.g., their heart
rate).
Polygraph operators attempt to tell if
someone is lying by observing that
person’s physiological responses while
answering questions.
Source of image: www.clipart.com
Can Polygraph Machines Tell if
People are Lying?
• Averaging over dozens of studies, people
were correctly labeled as lying or telling
the truth 86% of the time.
• This still allows for a substantial number
of errors, including false positives, where
people who are telling the truth are
incorrectly labeled as liars.
Can Polygraph Machines Tell if
People are Lying?
• Averaging over dozens of studies, people
were correctly labeled as lying or telling
Think
of time.
it this way:
the truth 86%
of the
If you
wrongly accused
• This still allows
forwere
a substantial
number
of a serious
crime, would
of errors, including
false positives,
where
you
be willing
to take
people who are
telling
the truth
are a
test that
had a 14%
incorrectly labeled
as liars.
chance of landing you in
prison?
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.
Can Polygraph Machines Tell if
People are Lying?
Researchers continue to try to develop
better lie detectors, using such measures
as:
– Patterns of brain waves
– Where people look involuntarily
– Blood flow in the face using
So far, however, none of these measures
has proved to be any better than the
polygraph.
A concern with all physiological measures of
deception is whether guilty people can
learn to beat the tests.
There is some evidence that people can
deliberately act in ways that reduce the
validity of the results of polygraph tests,
such as biting their tongue and doing
mental arithmetic.
The search continues, but there is still no
perfect lie detection machine that can
always differentiate lies from the truth.
Source of images: www.clipart.com
Can Eyewitness Testimony Be Improved?
Given the importance of such testimony in
criminal trials, are there ways to improve it?
Two general approaches have been tried, but
neither has proved very successful:
1. Hypnosis
Cognitive Interview
2. Cognitive
A technique whereby trained
Interview
interviewers try to improve
witnesses’ memories by
focusing attention on event
details and context.
The Recovered Memory Debate
• Another form of eyewitness memory has
received a great deal of attention:
the case in which a person recalls having
been the victim of a crime, typically sexual
abuse, after many years of being
consciously unaware of that fact.
• The accuracy of such recovered
memories has been hotly debated.
The Recovered Memory Debate
In 1988, Paul Ingram’s daughters accused him of sexual
abuse, satanic rituals, and murder, events they claimed
to have recalled suddenly years after they occurred.
The police could find no evidence for the crimes, and
Ingram initially denied that they had ever occurred.
Eventually, though, he became convinced that he, too,
must have repressed his past behavior and that he
must have committed the crimes, even though he could
not remember having done so.
According to experts who have studied this case, Ingram’s
daughters genuinely believed that the abuse and killing
had occurred—but they were wrong.
Things they thought they remembered were actually false
memories.
The Recovered Memory Debate
False Memory Syndrome
Remembering a past traumatic experience
that is objectively false but nevertheless
accepted as true.
There is evidence that people can acquire
vivid memories of events that never
occurred, especially if another person—
such as a psychotherapist—suggests that
the events occurred.
The Recovered Memory Debate
• Unfortunately, some psychotherapists do not
sufficiently consider that by suggesting past
abuse, they may be planting false memories
rather than helping clients remember real
events.
• This is not to say, however, that all recovered
memories are inaccurate.
• Unfortunately, it is very difficult to distinguish the
accurate memories from the false ones in the
absence of any corroborating evidence.
JURIES:
GROUP PROCESSES
IN ACTION
How Jurors Process Trial Information
• Some psychologists suggest that jurors
decide on one story that best explains all
the evidence.
• They then try to fit this story to the
possible verdicts they are allowed to
render, and if one of those verdicts fits
well with their preferred story, they are
likely to vote to convict on that charge.
How Jurors Process Trial Information
Lawyers typically present the evidence in one of
two ways.
1. Story Order:
They present the evidence in the sequence in
which the events occurred, corresponding as
closely as possible to the story they want the
jurors to believe.
2. Witness Order
They present witnesses in the sequence they
think will have the greatest impact, even if this
means that events are described out of order.
How Jurors Process Trial Information
Pennington & Hastie (1988)
• When the prosecutor used story order and the defense
used witness order, the jurors were most likely to
believe the prosecutor. 78% voted to convict.
• When the prosecutor used witness order and the
defense used story order, the tables were turned.
Only 31% voted to convict.
• One reason the conviction rate in felony trials in
America is so high (about 80%), prosecutors usually
present evidence in story order, whereas defense
attorneys usually use witness order.
If you are a budding lawyer, remember this when you are
preparing for your first trial!
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.
The problem with some confessions is that they are
NOT autobiographical at all, but false.
Confessions: Are They Always
What They Seem?
• Thirteen years after the highly publicized brutal
rape of the "Central Park jogger," Matias
Reyes, in prison for three rapes and a murder,
confessed to the crime, reporting he had acted
alone.
• His DNA matched semen recovered from the
victim (none of the teenagers' DNA matched),
and he gave details of the crime scene that
were known only to the police.
• In 2002 a judge vacated the convictions of five
boys who had confessed to the crime.
Confessions: Are They Always
What They Seem?
• If the boys were innocent, then why did they
confess to the crime?
• The interrogation process can go wrong in
ways that elicit false confessions, even to
the point where innocent suspects come to
believe that they actually did commit the
crime.
• One problem is that police investigators are
often convinced that the suspect is guilty,
and this belief biases how they conduct the
interrogation.
Confessions: Are They Always
What They Seem?
• Investigators often use tactics to elicit
confessions, such as telling people that an
eyewitness had seen them commit the crime.
• After hours of prolonged interrogation, innocent
people can become so fatigued that they don't
know what to think, and may even come to
believe that they are guilty of the crime.
• In fact, in a large number of cases in which
DNA evidence exonerated defendants who had
been falsely convicted of a crime, the defendant
had confessed.
Source of image: www.clipart.com
Confessions: Are They Always
What They Seem?
One solution to coerced confessions is
requiring that interrogations be
videotaped.
Thus, a jury can view the recording and
judge for themselves whether the
defendant was coerced into admitted
things he or she didn't do.
Source of image: www.clipart.com
Deliberations in the Jury Room
After hours of jury deliberation,
those initially in the minority
opinion tend to go with the
initial majority.
In 97% of jury decisions!
Nevertheless, while a minority of jurors are unlikely
to convince a majority of jurors to change their
verdict from first-degree murder to not guilty,
they might well convince the majority to change
the verdict to a lesser charge.
Source of image: www.clipart.com
Jury Size: Are Twelve Heads
Better than Six?
• Although juries have traditionally been
composed of twelve people, the U.S.
Supreme Court decided in 1970 that there
was nothing sacrosanct about this number
and allowed smaller juries in some cases.
Source of images: www.clipart.com
Jury Size: Are Twelve Heads
Better than Six?
• One problem with small juries is that they
reduce the probability that minority members
will be represented.
• Remember the Asch experiments: If you
dissent from the majority even when you know
you are right, you are more likely to persist if
you have an ally.
• Most social psychologists who have conducted
research in this area believe that all juries
should consist of 12 people.
Source of image: www.clipart.com
WHY DO PEOPLE
OBEY THE LAW?
Do Severe Penalties Deter Crime?
Deterrence Theory
The idea that threat of legal punishment
causes people to refrain from criminal
activity as long as the punishment is
perceived as relatively severe, certain,
and swift.
The U.S. crime rate has gone down.
But why?
Do Severe Penalties Deter Crime?
Some experts have attributed these
promising trends to, among other things,
stiffer penalties for crimes.
Others have suggested that the drop in
violent crime is due not to stiffer penalties
but to the fact that the population of
adolescents and young adults, who are
most responsible for violent crimes, has
been declining in the past few years.
Do Severe Penalties Deter Crime?
• You might decide not to speed when the
fines are high and your road is frequently
patrolled by police.
• But what about crimes that are less likely
to involve rational decisions?
Like murder?
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.
Do Severe Penalties Deter Crime?
A number of studies have compared the murder
rates in American states that have the death
penalty with those that do not, compared the
murder rates in American states before and
after they adopted the death penalty, and
compared the murder rates in other countries
before and after they adopted the death
penalty.
The results are unambiguous: There is no
evidence that the death penalty prevents
murders.
Procedural Justice:
People’s Sense of Fairness
People will obey a law if they think it is just,
even if it is unlikely that they will be caught
for breaking it.
What determines whether people think a law is
just?
Procedural Justice
People’s judgments about the fairness
of the procedures used to determine
outcomes, such as whether they are
innocent or guilty of a crime.
In sum, social psychological research indicates that
the American legal system can go wrong in a
number of ways:
• Juries rely heavily on eyewitness testimony when in
fact such testimony is often in error.
• Determining when witnesses are telling the truth is
difficult, even with the use of polygraphs
• Because juries are groups trying to reach
consensus by discussing, arguing, and bargaining,
conformity pressures and group processes can lead
to faulty decisions.
Source of images: Microsoft Office Online.
6th edition
Social Psychology
Elliot Aronson
University of California, Santa Cruz
Timothy D. Wilson
University of Virginia
Robin M. Akert
Wellesley College
slides by Travis Langley
Henderson State University
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.