Social influence and legal system

 Criminal justice system is the branch of the law that deals with controlling
criminal activities in society through imposing penalties on the offenders of
the specific laws.
 Most of the legal proceedings involve an element of social influence. For
example, police detectives inadvertently affecting peoples responses, or
attorneys persuading the jurors and the judge of guilt/innocence of a
person.
 Line-up - Procedure in which witnesses to a crime are shown several
people, one or more of whom may be suspects in a case, and asked to
identify those that they recognize as the person who committed the crime.
 Line-ups can be highly error prone due to bias
 2 Types of lineups:
 1.Sequential lineups - The suspects are presented one at a time and
witnesses indicate whether they recognize each one
 2.In simultaneous lineups - All the suspects are shown at once and
witnesses are asked to indicate which one (if any) they recognize.
 Meta analysis of studies that compared false identification rates proved
that sequential line-ups are more accurate. There is no difference in rate of
correct identification, but sequential lineups guarantees reduction in false
identification. This is because in sequential lineups witnesses are forced to
make absolute judgments, by comparing each individual to their memory of
the person. In contrast, in simultaneous lineups witnesses make
comparative judgments between the suspects in the array they are
presented with, which results in witnesses selecting the person who looks
most similar to their memory of the person.
 Instructions-There are subtle levels of social pressure on eyewitnesses. It
can be in the form of biased instructions.
 Instructions given to the eye witnesses can be:
 1.Neutral instructions - Simply ask to identify the person who committed
the crime, and don't make any statements about whether this person is or
is not present in the lineup.
 2.Biased instructions - suggest that the criminal is present and that his task
as witnesses is to pick this person out from the others. Such instructions
expose witnesses to a subtle form of social influence: they may feel
pressured to identify someone, even if no one they recognize is present.
 Experiment by Pozzulo & Dempsey (2006)
 They had both children and adults watch a videotape of a staged crime -
one in which a woman's purse was stolen. Both groups were then shown a
lineup consisting of photos of people who resembled the people who
committed the crime. Simultaneous presentation of the photos was used. In
the neutral instructions, they were told that the criminal might or might not
be present in the lineup. In the biased instructions condition, they were led
to believe that this person was indeed present in the lineup. Though the
real culprit was not included in the lineup , both adults and children were
more likely to falsely identify an innocent person after hearing the biased
instructions (ones leading them to conclude that the criminal was present)
Social cognition and legal system: Eyewitness testimony
 Elizabeth Loftus (1974, 1979) found that those who had “seen" were
believed by the jurors even when their testimony was shown to be useless.
When a hypothetical robbery - murder case was presented to students,
with circumstantial evidence but no eyewitness testimony, only 18 percent
voted for conviction. With the addition of a single eyewitness 72 percent
voted for conviction. For a third group, even when the defense attorney
discredited that eye witness testimony 68 percent still Voted for conviction.
 Can’t jurors spot erroneous testimony?
 Calculator Theft Experiment (Wells et al 1979)-At University of Alberta, they
staged 100s of eyewitness thefts and each eyewitness was asked to identify
culprit from a photo lineup. Others acted as jurors. Both incorrect correct
eye witnesses were believed 80% of the time. In a follow up of staging It in
conditions of being able to get a good look/not, jurors believed witnesses
more when the conditions were good. But even in poor conditions, 62% of
jurors believed witnesses had misidentified an innocent person. Jurors are
skeptical of eye witnesses whose memory of trivial details is poor - though
these to be more accurate
 What is going wrong in eyewitness testimonies/ When eyes deceive
 Borchard (1932) documented 65 convictions of people whose innocence
was later proven. Most resulted from mistaken identifications.
 among the first 130 convictions overturned by DNA evidence, 78 percent
were wrongful convictions influenced by mistaken eyewitnesses (Stambor,
2006).
 4,500 of 7,500 wrongful convictions based on mistaken identification
(Cutler & Penrod, 1995)
 Buckhout(1974) found that when students witnessed a staged assault on a
professor, and were asked to identify the assailant after 7 weeks, 60
percent chose an innocent person
 Wells and his colleagues report (2002, 2006) that it’s the confident
witnesses whom jurors find most believable. But unless conditions are very
favourable, as when the culprit is very distinctive looking, the certainty of
witnesses often bears only a modest relation to their accuracy
 This is so even when the witness has high level of certainty, because
assertiveness trait of a person isn’t necessarily related to accuracy of
information.
 University of Stirling face researcher Vicki Bruce (1998) was surprised to
discover that subtle differences in views, expressions, or lighting “are hard
for human vision to deal with.” We construct our memories based partly on
what we perceived at the time and partly on our expectations, beliefs, and
current knowledge
 strong emotions that accompany witnessed crimes and traumas further
corrupt eyewitness memories. In one experiment, visitors wore heart rate
monitors while in the London Dungeon’s Horror Labyrinth. Those exhibiting
the most emotion later made the most mistakes in identifying someone
they had encountered
 Charles Morgan’s 2004 POW camp
 Charles Morgan and his team of Yale colleagues and military psychologists
(2004) documented the effect of stress on memory with more than 500
soldiers at survival schools—mock prisoner of war camps that were training
the soldiers to withstand deprivation of food and sleep, combined with
intense, confrontational interrogation, resulting in a high heart rate and a
flood of stress hormones.
 A day after release from the camp, when the participants were asked to
identify their intimidating interrogators from a 15-person line-up, only 30
percent could do so, although 62 percent could recall a low-stress
interrogator.
 Thus, concluded the researchers-contrary to the popular conception that
most people would never forget the face of a clearly seen individual who
had physically confronted them and threatened them for more than 30
minutes, many were unable to correctly identify their perpetrator.
 Cases:
 1.The Case of Jennifer Thompson and Ronald Cotton
 One night in 1984, a stranger broke into Jennifer Thompson’s apartment
and raped her. During the assault, she was determined that she was going
to make sure that her rapist was caught and punished. She began recording
every detail of her attacker- carefully studying his face: noting his hairline,
brow, chin, listened hard to his voice and speech, looked for scars, for
tattoos, for anything that would help identify the rapist. After the assault,
Thompson, then a 22-year-old college student, helped police sketch artists
create a composite picture of her attacker. Later, in a photo line-up, she
identified Ronald Cotton — a 22-year-old man who looked strikingly like her
sketch and had previous run-ins with the law. Then, she picked Cotton from
a live line-up. Cotton was convicted of rape and sentenced to life in prison.
 A decade later, DNA testing revealed that Cotton was not a match to semen
samples from Thompson’s assailant. But the samples did match the DNA of
another convict, Bobby Poole — who shared similar (but not striking) facial
features as Cotton.
 2.Kirk Bloodsworth
 Kirk Bloodsworth is the first American sentenced to death exonerated by
DNA testing
 A former marine discus champion, he was convicted and death sentenced
for 1984 rape and murder of 9yr old Dawn Hamilton in Maryland
 5 witnesses gave testimony against him which was the principal evidence
against him
 3.James Newsome
 Chicagoan James Newsome, who had never been arrested before, to prison
on a life sentence for supposedly gunning down a convenience store owner.
 Fifteen years later he was released, after fingerprint technology revealed
the real culprit to be Dennis Emerson, a career criminal who was three
inches taller and had longer hair

The Misinformation Effect

 Misinformation effect is the tendency for post event information to
interfere with the memory of the original event. It can lead to inaccurate
memories and even create false memories
 even relatively subtle information following an event can have a dramatic
effect on how people remember.
 In studies of misinformation effect, Loftus (1979a, 1979b, 2001) found that
after suggestive questions by police and attorneys (who ask qns framed
based on their understanding of the event, repeatedly), witnesses may
believe that a red light was actually green or that a robber had a moustache
when he didn’t.
 Loftus and Palmer (1974) Reconstruction of Automobile Destruction
 Loftus tested the influence of (mis)leading information in terms of both
visual imagery and wording of questions in relation to eyewitness
testimony.
 Loftus and Palmer asked people to estimate the speed of motor vehicles
using different forms of questions. Estimating vehicle speed is something
people are generally poor at and so they may be more open to suggestion.
 Experiment 1
 Forty-five American students formed a sample
 This was a laboratory experiment with five conditions, with independent
measures experimental design
 7 films of traffic accidents, ranging in duration from 5 to 30 seconds, were
presented in a random order to each group.
 After watching the film participants were asked to describe what had
happened as if they were eyewitnesses.  Then they were asked specific
questions, including the question “About how fast were the cars going
when they (smashed / collided / bumped / hit / contacted) each other?”
 Indep Variable - wording of the question and Dep Variable- the speed
reported by the participants.
 Result: The estimated speed was affected by the verb used. The verb
implied information about the speed, which systematically affected the
participants’ memory of the accident.
 Participants who were asked the “smashed” question thought the cars were
going faster than those who were asked the “hit” question. The participants
in the “smashed” condition reported the highest speed estimate (40.8
mph), followed by “collided” (39.3 mph), “bumped” (38.1 mph), “hit” (34
mph), and “contacted” (31.8 mph) in descending order.
 Explanations for the result:
 Response-bias factors: The misleading information provided may have
simply influenced the answer a person gave (a 'response-bias') but didn't
actually lead to a false memory of the event. For example, the different
 speed estimates occur because the critical word (e.g. 'smash' or 'hit')
influences or biases a person's response.
 2.The memory representation is altered: The critical verb changes a
person's perception of the accident - some critical words would lead
someone to have a perception of the accident being more serious. This
perception is then stored in a person's memory of the event.
 If the second explanation is true, we would expect participants to
remember other details that are not true. Loftus and Palmer tested this in
their second experiment.
 Experiment 2
 150 students were shown a one-minute film which featured a car driving
through the countryside followed by four seconds of a multiple traffic
accident.
 the students were questioned about the film as groups of 3. 50 students
were asked-'how fast were the car going when they hit each other?',
another 50 'how fast were the car going when they smashed each other?',
and the remaining 50 participants were not asked a question at all (i.e., the
control group)
 A week later, without seeing the film again they answered ten questions,
one of which was a critical one randomly placed in the list: “Did you see any
broken glass? Yes or no?" There was no broken glass on the original film.
 Result: Participants who were asked how fast the cars were going when
they smashed were more likely to report seeing broken glass.
 The results from experiment two suggest that this effect is not just due to a
response-bias because leading questions actually altered the memory a
participant had for the event.
 So it was proven that leading questions affected eye witness testimony
through response bias and also by creating false memories.
 Why Misinformation effect happens
 One explanation is that the original information and the misleading
information presented after the fact get blended together in memory.
 Another possibility is that the misleading information actually overwrites
the original memory of the event.
 Researchers have also suggested that since the misleading information is
more recent in memory, it tends to be easier to retrieve.
 In other cases, the important data from the original event may never have
been encoded into memory in the first place, so that when misleading
 information is presented, it is incorporated into the mental narrative to fill
in these "gaps" in memory- this filling in as called Confabulation
 false memories feel and look like real memories. They can be as persuasive
as real memories. This is true of young children as well as adult
 Stephen Ceci and Maggie Bruck (1993a, 1993b, 1995) demonstrated
children’s suggestibility by telling children, once a week for 10 weeks,
“Think real hard, and tell me if this ever happened to you.” For example,
“Can you remember going to the hospital with the mousetrap on your
finger?” when later interviewed by a new adult who asked the same
question, 58 percent of pre-schoolers produced false and often detailed
stories about the fictitious event. One boy explained that his brother had
pushed him into a basement woodpile, where his finger got stuck in the
trap. Given such vivid stories, professional psychologists were often fooled.
They could not reliably separate real from false memories—nor could the
children. When told the incident never actually happened, some protested
and claimed they remember it.
 such findings raise the possibility of false accusations, as in alleged child sex
abuse cases where children’s memories may have been contaminated by
repeated suggestive questioning and where there is no confirming
evidence.
 This “imagination inflation” happens partly because visualizing something
activates similar areas in the brain as does actually experiencing it
 Accurate retelling of events after crime help resist misinformation effect
 Retelling
 Retelling events commits people to their recollections, accurate or not. An
accurate retelling helps resist misleading suggestions that come later
 However, the more we retell a story, the more we convince ourselves of a
falsehood. Wells, Ferguson, and Lindsay (1981) demonstrated this by having
eyewitnesses to a staged theft rehearse their answers to questions before
taking the witness stand. Doing so increased the confidence of those who
were wrong and thus made jurors who heard their false testimony more
likely to convict the innocent person
 we often adjust what we say to please our listeners. Moreover, having done
so, we come to believe the altered message. Blair Sheppard and Neil
Vidmar - At the University of Western Ontario, they had some students
serve as witnesses to a fight and others as lawyers and judges. When
 interviewed by lawyers for the defendant, the witnesses later gave the
judge testimony that was more favourable to the defendant
 Without changing the facts, altering the tone and choice of words can bias
those listening to the testimony. This was proved in Vidmar and Liard’s
follow up experiment
Reducing the errors in eyewitness testimony (based on the book Eye witness
guide)
 1)Train police interviewers’
 Ronald Fisher on his study on Florida police detectives found that Usually,
following an open-ended beginning (“Tell me what you recall”), the
detectives would occasionally interrupt with follow-up questions, including
questions eliciting terse answers (how tall was he)
 Cognitive interview method:
 interviewers begin by allowing eyewitnesses to offer their own unprompted
recollections.
 The recollections will be most complete if the interviewer jogs the memory
by first guiding people to reconstruct the setting. Have them visualize the
scene and what they were thinking and feeling at the time.
 showing pictures of the setting can promote accurate recall
 After giving witnesses ample, uninterrupted time to report everything that
comes to mind, the interviewer then jogs their memory with evocative
questions (“Was there anything unusual about the voice? Was there
anything unusual about the person’s appearance or clothing?”).
 Ronald Fisher trained detectives to use this cognitive interview method, and
the information obtained from eyewitnesses increased 50 percent without
increasing the false memory rate
 interviewers on memory reconnaissance missions must be careful to keep
their questions free of hidden assumptions. E.g. “Did you see the broken
headlight?” triggered twice as many “memories” of non-existent events as
questions without the hidden assumption: “Did you see a broken headlight?
 Errors are especially likely when the witness has to stop, think, and
analytically compare faces. Eyewitnesses who make their identifications in
less than 10 to 12 seconds were nearly 90 percent accurate
 Younger eyewitnesses, and those who had viewed the culprit for more than
a minute, were also more accurate than older eyewitnesses
 2)Minimize false line-up identifications
 remind witnesses that the person they saw may or may not be in the
lineup.
 Alternatively, give eyewitnesses a “blank” lineup that contains no suspects
and screen out those who make false identifications.
 Sequential line-ups preferred more than simultaneous lineups, where they
simply compare people and choose the person who most resembles the
one they saw commit a crime
 3)Educate jurors
 Studies in Canada, Great Britain, and the United States reveal that jurors
are unaware of how many factors affect eye witness testimony
 To educate jurors, experts now are asked frequently to testify about
eyewitness testimony. Their aim is to offer jurors the information regarding
the influences of false memory, line-ups, prejudice etc
 When taught the conditions under which eyewitness accounts are
trustworthy, jurors become more discerning
 These factors include: Question wording, Lineup instructions, Confidence
malleability, Mug-shot-induced bias, Postevent information, Attitudes and
expectations, Cross-race bias etc (table 15.1)
Influence of stereotypes and Prejudice on the Legal system
 Stereotype- positive or negative beliefs we hold about the characteristics of
a social group. E.g. socioeconomic status - defendants are seen as guilty if
they hail from a community that is often linked with crime
 Prejudice- an unjustifiable negative attitude towards an outgroup
 Stereotypes and prejudices are problematic because they create
discrimination – unjustified negative behaviours towards outgroup
members by virtue of their group membership
 In 2015, Canadian judge Robin Camp acquitted Alexander Scott for the rape
of a woman at a party. Camp questioned why the victim had not done more
to resist the attack. He blamed the victim for not being careful enough
despite knowing she was drunk. Camp also noted the alleged victim’s lack
of physical and verbal resistance, and her low socioeconomic status
 Characteristics of defendants and jurors
 people accused of most major crimes are less likely to be found guilty if they
are physically attractive, female, and of high socioeconomic status rather
than low
 Race and ethnic background
 In the United States, African American defendants are more likely than
whites to be convicted of crimes. They are over represented on death rows
 Studies prove that Racially diverse juries - half white members and other
half black members are more efficient than all-white jury
 Physical attractiveness
 attractive defendants have a major advantage over unattractive ones with
respect to being acquitted, receiving a light sentence, and gaining the
sympathy of the jurors
 Michael Efran (1974) asked some of his University of Toronto students
whether attractiveness should affect presumption of guilt. They answered,
“No, it shouldn’t.” But When Efran gave students a description of the case
with a photograph of either an attractive or an unattractive defendant, they
judged the more attractive as less guilty
 O. J. Simpson’s case- as one prospective juror put it, “a hunk of a fellow,” –
being a person that was a public figure, well liked and handsome, he got the
sympathy of the jurors
 In a mammoth experiment conducted with BBC Television, Richard
Wiseman (1998) showed viewers evidence about a burglary, with just one
variation. Some viewers saw the defendant played by an actor that fit what
a panel of 100 people judged as the stereotypical criminal—unattractive,
crooked nose, small eyes. Among 64,000 people phoning in their verdict, 41
percent judged him guilty. Other viewers who saw an attractive, baby-faced
defendant with large blue eyes. Only 31 percent found him guilty
 Baby faced defendants rather than mature faced defendants less likely to
be found guilty. People with baby faces- (large, round eyes and small chins)
seemed more naive and were found guilty more often of crimes of mere
negligence but less often of intentional crimes
 Gender
 female defendants tend to be treated more leniently by juries and courts
than male defendants, but this depends on the specific crime- in cases
involving assault, female defendants are more likely to be found guilty than
male defendants (because assault is considered an even more unacceptable
and unusual behaviour for women than men)
 The gender of jurors- there are consistent differences between male and
female jurors in their reactions to cases involving sexual assault. Male jurors
are more likely than women to conclude that the sexual interaction was
consensual.
 An analysis of the results of 36 studies of simulated cases of rape and child
abuse revealed that in responding to defendants accused of either crime,
women were more likely than men to vote for conviction
 Similarity
 Likeness leads to liking
 Jurors are more sympathetic to a defendant who shares their attitudes,
religion, race, or (in cases of sexual assault) gender
 helps explain why a national survey before the O. J. Simpson trial found that
77 percent of Whites, but only 45 percent of Blacks, saw the case against
him as at least “fairly strong”
 Paul Amato (1979) had Australian students read evidence concerning a left
or right-wing person accused of a politically motivated burglary. The
students judged less guilt when the defendant’s political views were similar
to their own
 When Cookie Stephan and Walter Stephan (1986) had English-speaking
people judge someone accused of assault, they were more likely to think
the person not guilty if the defendant’s testimony was in English, rather
than translated from Spanish or Thai.
 When a defendant’s race fits a crime stereotype—say, a White defendant
charged with embezzlement or a Black defendant charged with auto theft—
mock jurors offer more negative verdicts and punishments
 Black males convicted of murdering a White person were doubly likely to be
sentenced to death if they had more stereotypically Afrocentric features (58
percent versus 24 percent for Blacks with features less Afrocentric than
average)