An Exercise in Exceptions

Will and Timothy are joined by guest Dr. Mario Baldassari, for a chat about an international collaboration to replicate a previously published study. In this chat format, we gather regular authors and guests in Slack and have a moderated conversation, guided by prompts and questions selected in advance. Participants get to respond to each other's points, make comments, and ask each other questions in real-time. The transcript has been lightly edited. Will Crozier &#x1F419 Welcome to another Exercise in Exceptions chat! Today we’re joined by Dr. Mario Baldassari to talk about an issue that isn’t directly related to psych and law, but science in general. Mario was recently a part of a team that did an internationally collaborative replication – that is, a large team of researchers across the world ran a previously-published psychology study, to see if it still worked (or how far the effects generalized). Big international collaborations that produce repl...

A story of both a wrongful conviction and scientific fraud We’ve talked about many of the ways police investigations can go wrong, including mistaken eyewitness identifications , memory errors , and false confessions . Often, when people imagine police investigations running afoul, they imagine egregious cases in which police plant evidence or physically torture suspects to get them to produce confessions they know are false. Although situations like that do occur, mistakes in investigations require no intentional wrongdoing. A detective doesn’t need to be trying to get a false confession, for instance, in order to get one ( as our guest writer Fabi Alceste has written about) . Errors happen often without the investigators realizing anything has gone wrong. Similarly, when people imagine bad scientific research happening, they often imagine scientists fabricating data or committing outright fraud. Scientific fraud is a problem, but it’s quite rare. However, there are many questio...

Authority plays a prominent – perhaps obvious – role in the legal system. Police, lawyers, and judges all wield prestige and authority. Psychologists have been interested in people’s tendency to obey authority for decades, and much of our understanding of the psychology of authority is built on the work of one man. If you’ve taken an introductory psychology class, you have probably heard about Stanley Milgram’s studies on obedience to authority. Milgram’s program of obedience research is some of the most famous – if not the most famous – work in psychology. Many people have heard of Milgram’s work, but most people don’t know the details of his experiments or about the follow-up work of researchers who came after him. In the most well-known version of Milgram’s obedience experiment procedure 1 , an experimenter first greets two participants and explains that they are to take part in a study on the role of punishment in learning. The experimenter (apparently) randomly assigns one...

Guest post by Fabiana Alceste. In 1994, a Washington, D.C. detective named James Trainum questioned a woman under suspicion of homicide. After a 16-hour interrogation, the woman relented and provided a detailed narrative of how she and two other men killed a man and threw him in the Anacostia River 1 . Her confession seemed perfect—she incriminated herself and included accurate and privileged information about the crime that only the police and the true perpetrator could have known. After the confession, Trainum and his colleagues naturally considered the case closed. Although investigators could not find any other evidence against the suspect, her confession reinforced the investigators’ belief in her guilt – in part, because it contained those accurate details. Soon after, the investigation showed that it was impossible for this woman to have committed the crime—she had an ironclad alibi—and the charges against her were dropped. But how could she have possibly known the ...