Before psychological scientists
design studies and collect data, we need something to study. That is, we need
questions to answer. For researchers like us, specialists in psychology and law*,
these questions are usually related to the legal system. But where specifically
do we get our ideas? In some cases, they are the result of applying our
scientific knowledge and training to a topic; in others, we see an event or
case and want to know more about it.
Kitty Genovese's murder inspired a program of social psychology research |
One place we get our ideas is
from real-life events, like criminal cases. Sometimes these are cases that are
reported widely by the media; sometimes they are cases we encounter in the
course of our work. Cases that seem to defy common sense make us ask questions
about how they could have happened. A prominent example of a crime inspiring
research is the infamous murder of Catherine “Kitty” Genovese. Kitty was
murdered in 1964 in Queens, New York in a brutal attack that occurred over a
time period of about half an hour. Press coverage of her murder suggested that
several dozen eyewitnesses failed to intervene or call the police as she was attacked.
Although it later emerged that this reporting about the number of eyewitnesses was
incorrect**, the notion that large numbers of people could fail to intervene in
an emergency sparked the interest of researchers John Darley and Bibb Latané.
It’s shocking that so many people
could see an emergency unfolding and do nothing. Many social commentators at
the time opined that modern society made people callous. But perhaps it was
instead something inherent in the situation that made people less likely to
intervene. Darley and Latané started a program of research on the conditions in
which bystanders are more or less likely to intervene in emergencies or when
others are in distress1. Much of this research comprises experiments
in which participants – who are unaware of the true nature of the study –
witness an urgent situation and must decide, without prompting, whether they
will intervene and assist. The researchers can control many variables in the
situation, including the number of bystanders, the nature of the emergency, and
who is in distress. This research has found that, contrary what common sense
might tell us, as the number of bystanders in the area increases, individual bystanders
are less likely to intervene and a person in distress is less likely to receive
assistance overall2.
We are also often compelled to
conduct research by cases of wrongful conviction. Consider the case of Juan Rivera,
who was wrongfully convicted of rape and murder in 1993, partly on the basis of
a false confession which had been obtained after a lengthy and stressful
interrogation***. Rivera had a strong alibi and DNA evidence recovered from the
victim did not match him. But despite the exculpatory evidence, the prosecution
charged Rivera and offered an implausible argument to explain the lack of a DNA
match: that the 11-year old victim had consensual sex prior to being assaulted
by Rivera, who must have failed to ejaculate (and failed to leave any physical
trace at the scene). At three separate trials, Rivera was found guilty, and he
spent a total of 19 years in prison before being exonerated.
How is that people can be
convicted, even in the face of such strong exculpating evidence? This case and
others like it**** inspired researchers Sara Appleby and Saul Kassin to conduct
studies in which people acted as jurors in simulated cases where all of the
evidence and facts were the same, save variations in how the attorneys argued
the case. They found that improbable prosecutorial theories that attempt to
explain exculpatory evidence, like the one used in Rivera’s trial, can be remarkably
persuasive to jurors3. Put another way, a prosecutor suggesting a
crazy story may very well tilt the trial against the defendant. This may be
because people greatly try to understand complex information (like evidence in
a trial) with coherent stories, and the prosecutorial theories, though
vanishingly unlikely, provide a way of understanding the apparent
inconsistencies in the evidence (e.g., a confession and DNA evidence that
conflict).
Sensational and counter-intuitive
cases compel important questions about how apparently extreme events can occur,
but common legal and law enforcement practices can also inspire research,
especially if they are based on untested assumptions or if we don’t understand
them very well. For example, last week we wrote about our research project
related to bait questions – a common
interview technique in which an interrogator asks a suspect about hypothetical
evidence (which may not actually exist). That project got its start a couple
years ago when we shared an office at John Jay College as the result of a conversation
during some downtime.
As Timothy remembers it*****, he was
complaining about bait questions to some other colleagues in the office. He had
recently run a training course for law enforcement and military interrogators,
and he found that many of them repeatedly used bait questions in the training interrogations.
His intuition was that something seemed problematic about them, but he struggled
to clearly identify what it was. Overhearing the conversation, Will pointed out
that bait questions sounded a lot like the way researchers suggest
misinformation to participants in memory studies – a field of research that had
never been applied to interrogations in this way before. We thought it might be
possible that bait questions, despite being hypothetical, might lead people to
believe the suggested evidence really existed, like a classic misinformation
effect. We then put our heads together and planned the first of our studies on
how bait questions could influence memory4.
Alternatively, we might draw from
past research or psychological theory and try to apply it to issues in the
legal system. That is, we might start with a practical problem in a legal
context, and then we try to use what we already know from psychology to solve
that problem. One of the most successful examples of researchers applying
well-established psychology to a real-world problem is the Cognitive Interview.
Witnesses and victims often have difficulty remembering details of what they
experienced – after all, memory is rarely perfect. The Cognitive Interview was
developed by Ron Fisher and Ed Gieselman, as a technique for enhancing
witnesses’ memory5.
The Cognitive Interview comprises
a series of interviewing techniques based on our theoretical understanding of
how memory works. The ability of a person to remember something depends on at
least two things: (1) the quality of the information stored in a person’s mind
(what psychologists call a “memory trace”) and (2) the circumstances under
which the person is trying to retrieve the memory (what we call the a quality
of the “retrieval cues”). To understand what this means, imagine a memory is a
printed photo, in one of several albums. The photo can be clear, or it can be
fuzzy and faded (this is like the quality of the memory trace). If you’re
looking for a specific picture, regardless of the quality of the photo, it can
be easier to find it if you’re already looking in the right album (this is like
the quality of the retrieval cues).
When we interview a witness, we
don’t have control over how good their memory trace is. However, we can try to
optimize the conditions of retrieval. From classic memory research we know that
people can remember more information when they have already mentally accessed
information related to what they’re trying to remember – that is, people can
use related information to “cue” their memory. For instance, it’s easier to
remember what the place you grew up was like if you catch a whiff of a familiar
smell from your childhood (like freshly baked cookies or newly cut grass)6.
Based on this idea, Cognitive Interview includes a technique called mental
context reinstatement, which involves having the witness actively recall the
sensory experience of the event – what they saw, heard, smelled, and felt to
use as memory cues for other relevant information. Dozens of experiments have demonstrated that
this tool can assist witnesses in remembering substantially more details about
what happened. In this way, our general knowledge of memory helps to solve a
specific, applied problem in the justice system.
Beyond the ones we discussed
here, there are plenty of other sources of inspiration for researchers. What
all these sources of research ideas have in common is that they raise
unanswered questions in psychology and law. Once we have a question, we can
apply our scientific knowledge and training to design and conduct an experiment
to find an empirical answer. Yet each experiment we conduct starts with a
common core – curiosity. Anything that stokes curiosity can be the beginnings
of research, whether a newspaper story, law article, or chapter in a psychology
textbook. In this way, you do not need to have a PhD in order to do research. You
just need to want to know more about the world around you.
This post was written by Timothy
Luke and Will Crozier
* The intersection of psychology
and law is also sometimes called legal psychology or forensic psychology.
Unfortunately, these terms are used inconsistently, and there’s little
agreement on what to call ourselves.
** Kitty Genovese’s case is too
complicated to explore thoroughly here. For an interesting read about the
complexity surrounding her murder and the subsequent investigation, see Kassin, S. M. (2017). The killing of Kitty Genovese: what
else does this case tell us? Perspectives on psychological science, 12(3),
374-381.
*** “Stressful” is something of
an understatement. After the interrogation, Rivera had an apparent psychotic
episode and repeatedly slammed his head against a wall in jail, while the
police typed a confession for him to sign.
**** In rape cases in which DNA
recovered from the victim does not match the defendant, prosecutors often argue
that the DNA must have originated from another subject – possibly another
consensual sexual partner or someone else who participated in the rape but was
not caught. These arguments are often highly improbable, yet they appear in
numerous cases – so many that people have taken to calling it the “unindicted
co-ejaculator” theory.
***** As a case study in how
fickle memory can be, Will and Timothy can’t quite agree on the details of what
he was complaining about.
References
[1] Darley, J. M., & Latané, B. (1968). Bystander
intervention in emergencies: diffusion of responsibility. Journal of
personality and social psychology, 8(4), 377-383.
[2] Fischer, P., Krueger, J. I., Greitemeyer, T., Vogrincic, C.,
Kastenmüller, A., Frey, D., ... & Kainbacher, M. (2011). The
bystander-effect: a meta-analytic review on bystander intervention in dangerous
and non-dangerous emergencies. Psychological bulletin, 137(4),
517-537.
[3] Appleby, S. C., & Kassin, S. M. (2016). When Self-report
Trumps Science. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 22(2),
127-140.
[4] Luke, T. J., Crozier, W. E., & Strange, D. (2017). Memory
errors in police interviews: The bait question as a source of
misinformation. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 6(3),
260-273.
[5] Memon, A., Meissner, C. A., & Fraser,
J. (2010). The Cognitive Interview: A meta-analytic review and study space
analysis of the past 25 years. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 16(4),
340-372.
[6] Easterbrook, J. (1959). The effect of
emotion on cue utilization and the organization of behavior. Psychological
review, 66(3), 183-201.
Comments
Post a Comment