Psychology 2990A/B Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: Eyewitness Testimony, Psych, Sound Recording And Reproduction
27 May 2018
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Psych 2990
May 7-11, 2018
Chapter 1: Psychology and the Law
The Canadian justice system
- Consists of criminal and civil law
- In civil cases, the plaintiff brings a complaint against the defendant for violating the
forer’s rights i soe ay
- The Cro attorey’s offie usually deides hether there is eough eidee to press
formal charges
- effect on police investigations and jurors
- Attitude change and persuasion techniques abound in the courtroom, as lawyers for
each side argue their case and as jurors later debate with one another and the process
of soial ogitio affet the jurors’ deisio akig he deidig guilt or ioee
Eyewitness testimony
- The most common cause of an innocent person being convicted of a crime is an
erroneous eyewitness
- Systematic experiments have confirmed that jurors rely heavily on eyewitness
testimony when deciding whether someone is guilty or not
- Mistaken eyewitness identification is responsible for more wrongful convictions than all
other cases combined
Why are eyewitnesses often wrong?
- Because eyewitness identification is a form of social perception, it is subject to similar
problems, particularly those involving memory
- To be an accurate witness, a person must successfully complete three stages of memory
processing: acquisition, storage and retrieval of the events witnessed
o Acquisition refers to the process by which people notice and pay attention to
information in the environment; people cannot perceive everything that is
happening around them, so they acquire only a subset of the information
available in the environment
▪ Factors like how much time they have to watch an event and the nature
of the viewing conditions can limit the amount of information about a
crime people take in
▪ Crimes usually occur under the conditions that make acquisition difficult
• Quickly, unexpectedly, in dark conditions
▪ Loftus and Harley: calculate the amount of detail lost in the perception of
a face as the distance increases – identifying celebrities decreases once
the distance reaches 7.5 meters
▪ The more stress people are under the worse their memory for people
involved in the details of the crime
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▪ Another reason is that witnesses are more likely to focus on the weapon
in the perps hands rather than their features
▪ The information people notice and pay attention to is also influenced by
what they expect to see
▪ Unfamiliar events or people are also more difficult to remember than
familiar events or people
• Own race bias
o Occurs because interact with people of their own race
more than they do others
o Storage refers to the process by which people store in memory information they
have acquired from the environment
▪ People can become confused about where they heard or saw something;
memories in one album can get confused with memories in another
▪ Reconstructive memory is the process by which memories of an event
become distorted by information encountered after the event has
occurred
▪ According to this phenomenon, information we obtain after witnessing
an event can change our memory of the event
▪ Loftus: found that misleading questions can change people’s minds about
how fast a car was going, whether broken glass was at the scene of the
accident, whether a traffic light was green or red and whether the robber
had a mustache
▪ Researchers have found that people are especially likely to incorporate
misinformation into their memories when the event they have witnessed
produces negative emotion – which is the case whenever people witness
crimes
▪ Misleading questions cause a problem with source monitoring, the
process by which people try to identify the source of their memories
▪ When information is stored in memory, it is not always tagged with
where it came from
o Retrieval refers to the process by which people recall information stored in their
memory
▪ Lineups have higher success rates than showing the eyewitness just one
person
▪ Witnesses often choose the person in a lineup who most resembles the
riial, ee if the reselae is’t strog
▪ To avoid this best guess problem, social psychologists suggest using the
following steps
• Ensure everyone in the lineup resembles the witnesses
description of the suspect
• Tell the witness that the person suspected of the crime may or
may not be in the lineup
• Do not always include the suspect in the initial lineup
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