Psychology and The Law Research Paper

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Psychology and the law is an extremely broad topic area that includes many basic and applied research areas; applied topics in mental health, memory, and jury behavior; and evaluation of laws and legal processes. Due to the diversity of topics within these areas, conclusive definitions that satisfy everyone in the field remain elusive. However, to incorporate this diversity, Ogloff and Finkelman (1999) defined the field as “the scientific study of the effect the law has on people and the effect people have on the law” (p. 3).

This research-paper provides a concise presentation of the field, including an overview of human interactions with the law, tensions between psychology and the law, and a brief history of the field. This research-paper also presents a description of the basic roles of psychologists in the legal system, career options, and overviews of some prominent research areas in psychology and the law. The chapter concludes with a discussion of additional current and future research areas in psychology and the law.

Human Interactions With The Law

In line with general psychological approaches across fields, psychologists who study psychology and the law emphasize the behavior, cognitions, emotions, and experiences of individuals involved in the legal system. Of course, all individuals within reach of the United States legal system are involved to some degree. The involvement appears evident for police officers, lawyers, judges, defendants, corrections officers, trial consultants, and others who work in or are assessed by the legal system. Some relationships within the legal system are less evident. All voters in the United States are participants in the legal system in that they can influence laws by vote, petition, or protest, and because voters, like other residents, can break or obey the law. Nonvoting citizens (e.g., individuals who are under the age of 18 or individuals who have lost the right to vote through dishonorable military discharge or other causes) have access to constitutional rights and due process under criminal law and have access to the civil legal system. Noncitizen residents of the United States may not be guaranteed these rights, but they live under United States laws. Even some noncitizen nonresidents are directly involved in the legal system as they petition for citizenship or in other ways. For example, as of the spring of 2007, some individuals are being denied the right to access legally the United States court system to challenge their indefinite incarceration at the Guantanamo Bay holding facility. Additionally, laws regulate corporations as well as people. Although so many individuals and corporations are involved, this research-paper focuses largely on the behavior, cognitions, emotions, and interactions of central actors in the legal system.

This research-paper focuses on the psychological study of individuals in the legal system, but other psychologists also work within the legal system, and psychology and the law in this research-paper is distinct from forensic psychology. Forensic psychologists—psychologists who work within the system to address specific legal questions about specific defendants (Nicholson, 1999)—answer applied questions about individuals in legal settings. These activities, detailed in Chapter 90, include but are not limited to assessing (a) whether an individual is competent to be tried, (b) whether a juvenile should be tried as an adult, (c) the degree to which a victim is psychologically injured by a crime or other act, and (d) what treatments could be appropriate for a specific offender

Laws regulate human behavior across many contexts. For example, the law dictates and supports the speed at which people drive, the age at which they can vote, their safety in their homes, and their expectations not to risk injury from products they buy. The law protects citizens from violence and theft. When conflict arises between members of society, they turn to the law to resolve these issues. In all of these cases, the law defines and prescribes acceptable behavior among individuals and corporations.

Despite the immense power the law and its representatives hold in society, the law, like United States culture, must continuously change in several ways. The law must update to incorporate new technologies and research data. For example, in the 1970s, courts did not have to debate the role of DNA evidence in criminal investigations or paternity suits. The law must also change to reflect changing social values. In 1999, Rosa Parks received the Congressional Gold Medal of Honor, the highest award bestowed by the United States Congress, for her refusal to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955. At the time of her civil disobedience, however, she was arrested and earned a criminal record for her actions. Today, United States law has changed, and her actions would no longer be illegal.

The legal system in the United States is divided into two distinct functions, criminal and civil law. When a crime occurs, the state or federal government investigates the crime and charges, prosecutes, and, if the jury or judge convicts the defendant, punishes the defendant. In civil law, an individual or corporation has caused harm to another individual, and the injured party (the plaintiff) may sue the individual or organization that caused the alleged injury (the defendant) to redress the harm caused by the defendant. As the O. J. Simpson case demonstrated, these systems remain independent, such that criminal charges and civil damages may be involved in the same event. Simpson was found not guilty in criminal court, but he was found liable in civil court for causing the wrongful death of his former wife and Ron Goldman. The topics described in this research-paper center largely on psychological topics within criminal law, but many research areas such as pretrial publicity and jury decision making play important roles across both branches of the court system.

Tensions Between Psychology And The Law

The science of psychology exists in a state of tension with the legal system in many ways (Ogloff & Finkelman, 1999). Fundamentally, the goals and processes of investigation in science differ substantially from those of investigation in the law. First, science is inductive. Researchers examine data from many field studies, correlational studies, and experiments and draw tentative, probabilistic conclusions. The law wants an answer that is, at least in criminal law, beyond a reasonable doubt.

Second, scientific conclusions remain provisional and open to falsification, and conclusions change in light of new data, new methodologies, and new paradigms. Court decisions set precedents that remain resistant to change without consideration from state or federal supreme courts. In other words, science cannot provide certainty of conclusions for the future, but the law looks to past legal precedents to determine truth and direct future policy.

Third, psychological science is nomothetic instead of ideographic. Researchers attempt to describe, predict, and explain the behavior of populations of organisms across a wide range of contexts in terms of probability—a researcher cannot predict the behavior of any particular individual with 100 percent accuracy. In contrast, judges and juries must evaluate the actions, intentions, accuracy, and other characteristics of each individual involved in a particular case. For example, researchers may predict that a population of highly confident eyewitnesses (i.e., those who are 95 percent certain of their memories) will make errors in approximately 15 to 30 percent of their claims (Wells, Memon, & Penrod, 2006), but researchers cannot determine whether a particular statement by a particular eyewitness is correct. The law, however, must evaluate the truthfulness of each statement by each eyewitness.

Fourth, a courtroom brings together two opposing sides who argue for competing views of truth. A community of scientists conducts a wide variety of research endeavors and then tries to form one general view of a psychological topic. Although researchers may report conflicting findings and may challenge one another about methods, outcomes, or interpretations of research, science seeks to improve the general body of knowledge. However, science does not determine truth by having two adversaries challenge each other (Ogloff & Finkelman, 1999).

Methodology

Methodology in psychology and the law is as broad as the field itself. Some researchers observe behavior in natural settings or search archival data for existing trends in actual court cases. For example, in civil jury research, Chin and Peterson (1985) found evidence for the deep pockets hypothesis, the notion that wealthier corporate or government defendants are more likely to be found liable and to pay larger damages than are less wealthy individual defendants, but wealth and corporate identity remain confounded in the archival data. These approaches yield ecologically valid data, but they lack experimental control. Other researchers use correlational data to assess policies or other phenomena even though this approach does not allow them to make causal inferences. For example, scholars use correlational methods to study the predictive validity of eyewitness confidence for eyewitness accuracy (Wells et al., 2006). Still other researchers may run well-controlled experimental simulations of legal events. These psychologists may ask participants to act as witnesses to staged events, videotaped crimes, or written descriptions of crimes, or they may ask participants to play the roles of jurors, interrogators, or even suspects (e.g., Kassin & Fong, 1999). Sometimes lines of research converge, as they do in the false confession literature, and in some cases different methodologies yield different results. For example, MacCoun’s (1996) well-controlled experimental investigation of the deep pockets hypothesis revealed that corporate identity is more important than wealth in civil suits. Wealth and corporate status were confounded in the archival data, but when MacCoun (1996) separated these variables experimentally, the participant-jurors were more likely to find corporate defendants than individual defendants liable across levels of income. The diversity of the field and the wide variety of goals of research result in a broad range of available methods for researchers to choose.

Roles Of Psychologists In The Legal System

There are several general roles for psychologists in the legal system, and many specific careers exist in psychology in the law (Bottoms et al., 2004). More generally, psychological researchers can impact the law in a variety of ways. Basic researchers, scientists who seek general or basic knowledge for its own sake, and applied researchers, scientists who study practical problems, can significantly influence the legal system. Although these basic and applied approaches appear to be different, they exist as two ends of the same continuum. Basic researchers inform the legal system by increasing the available knowledge on topics such as memory, human cognition, and social influence. Although research on the effects of different retention intervals on the recall of word lists does not appear to address issues in psychology and the law, such research contributes to the general body of knowledge related to memory.

Applied researchers approach specific problems in psychology and the law. For example, when critics argued that trained interrogators can analyze a suspect’s nonverbal behavior to determine whether a suspect is lying, Kassin and Fong (1999) acquired interrogator training materials, trained student observers to analyze behavior, and evaluated whether training caused observers to be more accurate. Although observers trained by Kassin and Fong (1999) were more confident and provided more reasons for their judgments, they were less accurate than untrained observers. Applied research topics abound in psychology and the law. Researchers have investigated the practical questions of whether sequential or simultaneous lineups lead to fewer errors (Steblay, Dysart, Fulero, & Lindsay, 2001), the effects of reading pretrial publicity before serving on a jury (Steblay, Besirevic, Fulero, & Jiminez-Lorente, 1999), and the potential impacts of expert testimony on jury decisions (Nietzel, McCarthy, & Kern, 1999).

Psychologists also evaluate the success of various legal interventions or reforms. A large and growing number of local districts use drug courts as an alternative to traditional criminal courts to help defendants receive addiction-treatment counseling and intensive supervision instead of incarceration. Of course, lawmakers wonder whether drug courts, with their emphasis on treatment and supervision, work better than incarceration. Psychologists have evaluated the effectiveness of drug courts and concluded that they do not eliminate recidivism but that defendants who work with drug courts are less likely to be arrested for later drug violations than are defendants sentenced in the traditional criminal legal system (Winick, 2003).

Psychologists also work in the legal system as advocates. For example, in 1954 psychologists joined other social scientists to advocate for desegregation in the landmark case, Brown v. Board of Education. More controversially, psychologists can act as trial consultants and work for one side in a court case. The Web site of the American Society of Trial Consultants (2007) lists several companies that engage in this work. The media spotlights consultants who engage in jury selection to help one side win a trial. Some researchers have argued that professional jury selection does not generate large advantages during trials (Fulero & Penrod, 1990), but these activities have continued to grow in the face of disagreement in the field. Trial consultants engage in other work as well. They may survey community members to determine whether a defendant can get a fair trial in a particular location. Work in this vein led to a change of venue for the trial of Timothy McVeigh—from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, to Denver, Colorado—to seat a jury that saw less pretrial publicity and less biased publicity regarding McVeigh before his trial (Studebaker & Penrod, 1997). Trial consultants may also prepare witnesses, assist lawyers in preparation for trial, and even run simulated trials with jury-eligible community members to evaluate the effectiveness of different trial strategies. Trial consultants and attorneys face similar ethical dilemmas. They must decide whether it is morally appropriate to work for the success of their clients. Despite controversy over the ethical implications of psychologists who work to affect legal outcomes, trial consulting businesses have continued to grow (American Society of Trial Consultants, 2007).

History

Questions of potential interactions between psychology and the law existed long before the founding of the United States or the establishment of a separate United State legal system. For example, Francis Bacon (1857) expressed concerns that inappropriate psychological motives held by some actors in the legal system could compromise the system. He suggested that the law should consider natural human tendencies when he said “revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more Man’s nature runs to, the more ought the law to weed it out” (p. 46). Centuries passed between Bacon’s statement and the formal involvement of psychologists in the law. In 1843, Daniel M’Naughton attempted to assassinate the prime minister of England, but he erred and instead killed Edward Drummond, the secretary to the prime minister. The court invited nine medical experts to act as forensic psychologists (the court did not use this label at the time, but this term is used today to identify these sorts of individuals; Brigham & Grisso, 2003). Their recommendations led the jury to find M’Naughton not guilty by reason of insanity, and he spent the rest of his life in an institution.

Louis D. Brandeis introduced social science into a legal decision in 1908 (Ogloff & Finkelman, 1999). The state of Oregon charged a laundry owner with violating gender-specific employment rules; the owner required his female employees to work more than 10 hours per day. The owner appealed his conviction, and Brandeis wrote an extensive brief on behalf of the state. Only a small portion of the Brandeis brief addressed legal arguments, and the rest of the brief presented data-based social science to demonstrate the negative effects of excessive work hours on women. Although Brandeis relied on beliefs about the general physical and psychological inferiority of women, and although the Brandeis brief employed what scholars today view as poor psychological science, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the law limiting women’s working hours. The term “Brandeis brief remains in use “to describe any collection of nonlegal materials submitted in a court case” (Ogloff & Finkelman, 1999, p. 7).

In 1954, the field of psychology and the law received a boost with the famous public school desegregation case, Brown v. Board of Education. A group of 35 social scientists, including many psychologists and psychiatrists, submitted a Brandeis brief to describe the negative impacts of school segregation on children (Brigham & Grisso, 2003). The long-term impact of Brown v. Board of Education is still being assessed, but it firmly established the legacy of psychologists influencing the law.

In the last several decades, psychology and the law has emerged as one of the fastest-growing and most topically diverse areas in psychology. Eric Dreikurs and Jay Ziskin helped to galvanize the field by gathering psychologists to form the American Psychology-Law Society in 1969 (Pickren & Fowler, 2003), and the organization has grown rapidly since its inception. Ogloff and Finkelman (1999) argued that the accelerating status of the field can also be seen in the growing number of experts testifying in court on legal topics, the increasing involvement of psychologists as consultants in the law, and the growing citation of psychological research by the courts.

Some Prominent Research Areas In Psychology And The Law

Practical problems drive many research areas in psychology and the law. Because legal investigators have used both simultaneous and sequential lineups when asking witnesses to identify suspects, researchers have evaluated the effectiveness and the inherent risks in each approach (Steblay, Dysart, Fulero, & Lindsay, 2001). Despite this consistent practical emphasis, researchers in psychology and the law also engage in theory testing. For example, Pennington and Hastie (1988) hypothesized that jurors prefer accounts of the events in question in a trial to fit a coherent story, and they tested jurors’ responses to trial materials that followed the chronological (i.e., story) order of the crime and trial materials organized in the order of the witnesses called. Jurors were more likely to decide verdicts in favor of the side (i.e., prosecution or defense) that presented materials in chronological order (Pennington & Hastie, 1988). Researchers may also utilize theory from other areas of psychology. For example, eyewitness researchers borrow from general mem-ory research to explain the ways that viewing books of mug shots can retroactively interfere with the original memory of the face of a perpetrator (Wells et al., 2006).

Eyewitness Testimony

Across many topics, eyewitness testimony remains a vivacious research area. The American Psychology-Law Society (2006) lists more than 1,400 references on the topic from 1883 and 2006. Eyewitness testimony research established roots as a research area in psychology over 100 years ago in Germany. There existed a strong German interest in eyewitness testimony (Sporer, 2006), and German scientists were engaging in productive research (Sporer, 2006) and conducting compelling teaching demonstrations in their classes (Munsterberg, 1908). In 1902, students in von Liszt’s criminology class at the University of Berlin found themselves as witnesses to an unexpected argument culminating in a gunshot (Munsterberg, 1908). As expected, students’ memories conflicted and were extremely poor. In 1906, Hugo Munsterberg extended this demonstration to a scientific meeting in Gottingen of “jurists, psychologists, and physicians, all, therefore, men well trained in careful observation” (p. 51). An individual in a colorful clown suit suddenly burst into the meeting, followed by a black man.

A struggle ensued, a shot was fired, and then both confederates ran from the room. Münsterberg (1908) then challenged the audience to report the events. He reported the high error rate, the large amounts of missing information in witness account of events, and the extensive inclusion of false details by the trained observers. Münsterberg’s views were widely read at this time and inspired increased student enrollment across psychology (Sporer, 2006).

Unfortunately, social history interacted with academic history to decrease interest in eyewitness testimony research. Münsterberg strongly identified with his German heritage and was an outspoken critic of United States involvement in World War I (Sporer, 2006). Additionally, his influence waned within the psychological community, he did not have graduate students to continue his work at the end of his career, and he faced additional criticism of his testimony research in particular. Eyewitness testimony faded from the forefront of psychology and the law until a 1970s “renaissance” led by Elizabeth Loftus and many others (Sporer, 2006, p. i).

Loftus inspired the reemergence of the field with studies on eyewitness errors and of the powerful effects of eyewitness testimony on juries. Her classic work, Eyewitness Testimony (1979/1996), defined the state of the field at that time and set the stage for productive decades of research. Unlike Münsterberg, Loftus had and continues to have a strong core of active students. She and her students inspired generations of researchers, who in turn helped to develop and continue a robust and consistent body of peer-reviewed investigation of eyewitness evidence (Wells et al., 2006). Eyewitness testimony is now a well-established research area in psychology, and the extensive body of work culminated in an empirically based 1999 set of U.S. Department of Justice guidelines for gathering eyewitness evidence.

A major gain in credibility of research on eyewitness testimony came with the advent of DNA testing within the legal system. Mistaken eyewitness testimony has led to a high yet unknown quantity of wrongful convictions across the United States. Individual examples are tragic and provide motivation for researchers and expert witnesses who may testify about potential eyewitness errors. For example, Kirk Bloodworth spent eight years in jail (two of them on death row) for the sexual assault and murder of a child in Maryland. Five eyewitnesses identified him as the perpetrator, and his conviction stood until DNA testing demonstrated that he was not guilty (Wells et al., 2006). Such tragedies run deep. Not only did these individuals lose years of their lives and time with their families to mistaken eyewitness testimony, but they have few or no options to seek damages or restitution for the legal errors that cost so much of their lives. These potential risks of false positives are particularly relevant in light of the ubiquitous nature of eyewitness testimony evidence.

The emergence of forensic DNA testing allowed investigators to determine definitively the guilt of some individuals who had previously been convicted of crimes. The Innocence Project (www.innocenceproject.org; 2007) has taken center stage in the investigation of guilt in historical cases (Wells et al., 2006), and approximately 75 percent of mistaken convictions uncovered by the Innocence Project involved mistaken eyewitness identification of the defendant. Prior to forensic DNA testing, psychologists had argued that eyewitness testimony led to wrongful convictions, but DNA evidence led to greater recognition from the legal system of the potential contributions of psychologists for dilemmas in eyewitness testimony. Wells et al. noted that eyewitness testimony remains a viable and growing area in psychology and the law.

Repressed Memory

Repression is a psychological construct with roots in Freudian ego defenses, and repression has existed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) through prior versions and into the current DSM-IV-TR in the diagnostic criteria for dissociative amnesia. Repression emerged into prominence in psychology and the law in the 1980s and 1990s with questions about repressed memories. Most notably, although researchers considered questions about misinformation and other factors that could negatively affect the accuracy of memories, Bass and Davis (1988) published The Courage to Heal. In this work, the authors guided readers through the processes by which readers who do not have memories of abuse can recover memories of childhood sexual abuse and learn to believe these memories. Bass and Davis (1988) sought to provide additional resources to aid the healing of survivors of these tragic abuses. The intense controversy through the 1990s and into the present centered on their claim that even for those individuals who do not remember abuse but “have a feeling that something abusive happened to [them], it probably did” (p. 21). In the early 1990s, these statements, along with a growing body of media stories and court cases involving repressed memory (see Loftus, 1993), inspired the eyewitness testimony field to include the study of the formation and modification of long-term autobiographical memories. Findings from this research instigated a controversy that continues into the present.

Researchers investigating repressed memories shared concerns about the legal system. What if juries are convinced by testimony based on recovered memories? How can the law determine whether recovered memories are true?

First, juries tend to believe that witnesses’ memories are true, even if they view recovered memories as slightly less credible (Loftus, 1993). Second, memories need not accurately reflect events as they occurred (Loftus, 1996). Third, researchers can implant completely false memories in laboratory participants that will cause participants to believe these memories and even to provide rich and convincing details from their memories of these events that never occurred (Loftus & Pickrell, 1995). Fourth, archival events provide convergent validity for these claims (Loftus, 1993). For example, during interviews with police and psychologists, Paul Ingram recalled that he had sexually abused his children (Loftus, 1993). He confessed to these behaviors, he believed his confession and his recovered memories of the abuse, and he added graphic details that police believed could have only come from Ingram’s memories of participation in the alleged abuse. The prosecution hired Richard Ofshe, a sociologist, as a consultant. Ofshe used similar interviewing techniques to prompt Ingram to confess to additional abusive acts that the police knew to be false. Ingram confessed to these false acts, wrote a three-page confession full of rich detail, and believed his own confession and recovered memories about the false abuse (Loftus, 1993).

The academic disagreements over repressed memory extend to the interface between psychology and the law. At an American Psychology-Law Society convention in the 1990s, three sitting judges heard two teams, each consisting of a lawyer and a psychologist, argue for and against the admissibility of repressed memory evidence in court debate. The three judges reached three different conclusions regarding the admissibility of this testimony. One said repressed memory testimony should always be admitted because the DSM-IV diagnostic criteria for dissociative amnesia include repression of traumatic or stressful life events. The second judge said such testimony should never be admitted due to difficulties in differentiating true and false memories, and the third judge argued that decisions should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. This disagreement illustrates the difficulties inherent in assessing the influence of psychology on the legal system.

Families can be decimated by accusations of childhood sexual abuse, regardless of whether the abuse actually occurred. Even in cases of actual childhood sexual abuse, years later there may exist little physical or other evidence to support these accusations—and determining the truth value of a serious accusation is far from simple. Fundamentally and tragically, observers must note that these memories of abuse, whether objectively true or false, feel real to the individual. Concerns about human costs of recovered memories continue to guide the debate.

Pretrial Publicity

Questions regarding pretrial publicity center on the tension between two guaranteed rights in the United States. The First Amendment to the Constitution allows freedom of the press, and the Sixth Amendment provides each defendant the right to a speedy trial before an impartial jury. When the press publicizes details of an ongoing investigation (e.g., prior convictions of the defendant, particular pieces of evidence, or a confession), the media expose potential jurors to these details. Later, when jurors decide the case, they can be affected by media information even if these materials are not admissible in the actual trial. Psychologists have long been aware of the biasing effects of pretrial publicity.

Psychologists have conducted pretrial publicity research in controlled experiments and in observational field studies involving actual cases. Both lines of research suggest that pretrial publicity poses serious threats to the fairness of the legal system. An extensive meta-analysis of experimental studies of pretrial publicity (Steblay, Besirevic, Fulero, & Jiminez-Lorente, 1999) revealed that pretrial publicity can affect jurors’ views of the defendant, their initial views of his or her guilt, and their final verdicts. Experimental work has demonstrated the effects of pretrial publicity on civil cases as well (Bornstein, Whisenhunt, Nemeth, & Dunaway, 2002).

Field studies also justify concerns about the impacts of pretrial publicity on legal outcomes. Surveys investigating participants’ knowledge and views about well-known crimes or about local criminal cases suggest that people who recall more pretrial publicity know more about the case and are more likely to have reached conclusions regarding the case (Studebaker et al., 2002).

Researchers distinguish between two types of pretrial publicity, specific and general (Greene & Wade, 1988). Most research addresses specific pretrial publicity or publicity about the case in question. Some research has been directed toward general pretrial publicity or publicity not about the case in question but about potentially relevant issues. For example, reading a newspaper article portraying a mistaken conviction can predispose jurors to be less likely to convict a defendant than are jurors who have read newspaper articles that are not trial related (Greene & Wade, 1988).

Researchers have thoroughly documented the effects of pretrial publicity, but reducing the effects of pretrial publicity continues to present difficult problems. Many remedies have been suggested, but few are effective. Some early suggestions included extensive jury deliberation. judicial admonition (instructions from the judge to the jury to dis-regard all pretrial publicity), careful jury selection, and thorough voir dire, or questioning of the jury pool. A comprehensive study by Kramer, Kerr, and Carroll (1990) demonstrated that these remedies do not substantially reduce the effects of pretrial publicity. However, two other methods have shown promise. A change of venue to a location away from the crime, as in the Timothy McVeigh trial discussed previously, can result in a pool of potential jurors who have experienced less publicity about the case (Studebaker & Penrod, 1997). Additionally, continuance— a delay of the trial—can reduce the impact of some aspects of pretrial publicity. Over time, potential jurors may forget factual information related to the case, but emotional pre-trial publicity persists over time (Kramer et al., 1990). For example, when McVeigh’s case went to trial long after the bombing, potential jurors going through voir dire may not have recalled that exactly 168 people died in the 1996 Oklahoma City bombing, but the memory of the popular and powerful photo of the firefighter carrying the child’s body from the wreckage may have remained vivid. Psychologists have been and remain involved in cases with potential pretrial publicity, both as advocates and as impartial experts.

Interrogation and Confession

Interrogation rooms remain some of the most secretive locations in the United States legal system. Police undertake interrogation to discover the truth about a crime. Police, along with society at large, want guilty people to confess and innocent people to resist. The stakes are particularly high because a confession is even more powerful than eyewitness testimony in a criminal trial (Kassin & Gudjonsson, 2004). A confession increases the likelihood of guilty verdicts even when the confession is coerced through threats or promises and even when judges admonish (i.e., instruct) jurors to ignore the confession (Kassin & Gudjonsson, 2004). Given the severity of a mistaken verdict, psychologists have investigated the process of interrogation and the possibility of false confessions.

Many factors increase the likelihood of true and false confessions. The physical structure of the room, a small, uncomfortable, soundproof space with an evident one-way mirror (see Kassin, 1997), interacts with the social influence exerted on the suspect by the interrogator to produce a situation in which confessions, both true and false, are likely. The interrogator initiates the process with a strong statement of the suspect’s guilt and then proceeds through a process that includes interrupting all denials, preventing the suspect from tuning out, and then showing sympathy and empathy for the suspect while encouraging the suspect to confess. These methods produce confessions, and researchers have argued that this high degree of social influence is necessary to ensure that guilty suspects confess, but the possibility of false confessions raises concerns (Kassin, 1997).

The number of annual false confessions remains unknown. Estimates vary widely, and some scholars argue that these numbers cannot be known (Kassin & Gudjonsson, 2004). In interviews of convicted defendants, both guilty and innocent defendants often maintain that they are innocent, and it remains extremely difficult to evaluate guilt in any absolute sense. When biological evidence exists and points to innocence, a confession may be overturned. The Innocence Project (2007) reports that in just over a quarter of their cases, a defendant incriminated him- or herself, confessed, or pleaded guilty when he or she was innocent.

Although it is hard to imagine why an innocent person might confess, researchers have delineated three possibilities. First, suspects may make voluntary false confessions. For example, in 1932 over 200 people confessed to kidnapping the Lindbergh baby. Second, innocent suspects may confess even though they know they are innocent; these coerced-compliant false confessions (Kassin & Gudjonsson, 2004) occur when participants believe that the benefits of confession outweigh the costs. For example, a coerced-compliant false confession could occur if the suspect believes that a conviction is inevitable and that a confession will lead to reduced punishment. Third, innocent suspects may confess and may truly believe that they are guilty. These coerced-internalized false confessions are most controversial and conceptually difficult (see Kassin, 1997). Suspects genuinely believe that they are guilty of crimes they did not commit, whether accusations are severe (e.g., the case of Paul Ingram) or minor, such as accidentally pressing an incorrect key during a computer task (Kassin & Gudjonsson, 2004).

Questions of true or false confessions would present fewer difficulties if the impact of confessions on juries were not so great. These issues are compounded when biases and beliefs of interrogators enter the mix. Interrogators overwhelmingly tend to believe that the suspect is guilty (Kassin, 1997). Although the effects of these biases on the interrogation process are difficult to measure in archival or ongoing legal cases, when student interrogators interviewed guilty or not guilty students, the longest and most intense interrogations occurred when the researchers led the student interrogator to believe that the innocent suspect was actually guilty (Kassin & Gudjonsson, 2004). Additionally, police interrogators endorse the “myth” (Kassin & Gudjonsson, 2004, p. 57) that they could recognize a false confession. When Kassin’s critics challenged his conclusions by arguing that trained observers would be more accurate than untrained observers, Kassin trained observers who were then less accurate but more confident than untrained observers (Kassin & Fong, 1999). These findings generated particular concern because confident expert witnesses, even those who are, as in this case, less accurate, have more influence on jurors’ decisions (Kassin & Fong, 1999).

These problems reach deeply into the legal system, but some solutions are available. Limiting the time that a suspect can spend in custody or in interrogation and working to reduce potential sleep or food deprivation could reduce risks. Extra precautions are required when the suspect is a member of a vulnerable population such as a child or an individual with a mental illness or developmental disabilities. Many interrogation researchers argue that requiring police to videotape confessions can reduce the likelihood of false confessions, protect suspects, and protect police from allegations of coercion (Kassin & Gudjonsson, 2004). These reforms are in place in some states and many local police departments, but many interrogations occur without the protection a video recording can provide.

Jury Decision Making

The jury has been one of the most mysterious forces in United States law. Critics have leveled extensive allegations that juries are unpredictable, unrepresentative of the population of the United States, biased, and irresponsible. Research into jury decision making has shed light on many phenomena in criminal and civil legal systems, but many questions remain.

Jurors face an immensely complex task. What if a professor presented his or her class to students as though the students were jurors in a criminal trial? First, if students have prior knowledge of the course content or have taken the prerequisites, these students cannot register for the class. Second, students do not know how long the course will last or when the final examination will be scheduled. Third, students do not have just one instructor—they have two or more instructors who present radically different versions of the same events, and students, who are unfamiliar with the topic yet not allowed to research the material themselves, must decide which of these experts is correct. Fourth, students in this class cannot take notes or ask questions. Fifth, the final examination is a group project that requires all group members to agree unanimously on the response to a true or false (i.e., guilty or not guilty) question. Finally, based on the students’ answer to the question, someone will be released, incarcerated, or, as in some cases, sentenced to die. How many students would register for this class? Juries must manage a vast quantity of information and use this information in accordance with intricate instructions presented in complex legal jargon.

One of the central and most controversial questions in jury decision-making research is how to conduct the research. A majority of this research has incorporated undergraduate students acting as mock jurors who read, hear, or watch a condensed trial. Legal and psychological scholars have long expressed concerns regarding the ecological validity of these findings (e.g., Konecni & Ebbesen, 1979). Bornstein’s (1999) extensive review of methods and outcomes, however, suggests that undergraduate jurors do not systematically differ from jury-eligible community members. In a series of meta-analyses of studies of jury decision-making research, Nietzel, McCarthy, and Kern (1999) reported that variables caused larger effects in controlled experiments with undergraduates and simplistic stimuli and that the effects of manipulated variables were smaller when research involved community-eligible mock jurors or realistic trial simulations. These and other concerns led them to advise jury researchers to seek convergent validity from four sources: (a) archival research of actual cases, (b) follow-up questions with actual jurors,

(d) realistic simulations with real juries or jury-eligible community members (Nietzel et al., 1999).

The composition of juries has raised questions about representativeness and fairness. Courts call jurors from voter registration lists and then seat juries from among the potential jurors who come to the courthouse. Not all United States citizens register to vote or are eligible to vote, and not all of the individuals who are called come to the courthouse. Judges disqualify some potential jurors due to conflicts of interest or other biases. Attorneys then use their own beliefs and sometimes the advice of psychologists acting as trial consultants to remove potentially biased jurors from the pool. Extensive disagreement exists in psychology and the law regarding the effectiveness of scientific jury selection. Selecting a jury based on personality traits of the jurors may generate small differences in trial outcomes, but for the defendant, whose life or liberty may be at stake, a small advantage may be worth the significant expense (Fulero & Penrod, 1990).

Although the strength of the evidence appears to be the most important factor in the outcome of a trial (Devine, Clayton, Dunford, Seying, & Pryce, 2001), numerous concerns exist that jurors’ decisions may be affected by extralegal (i.e., irrelevant) information. Jurors may be influenced by the defendant’s gender, wealth, race, or even attractiveness (Mazzella & Feingold, 1994). Legally irrelevant statements during the trial can also influence jury behavior. These statements could include evidence of the defendant’s prior conviction, other offenses with which the defendant is charged in the same trial, or inadmissible evidence that should have been excluded but was not (Nietzel et al., 1999). Although legal procedures such as judicial instructions exist to limit the impact of extralegal information, these instructions have little effect, and some researchers have found that these instructions increase the impact of the extralegal information (Nietzel et al., 1999).

Among other concerns regarding juries, scholars fear that expert witnesses can dominate juries and that jurors may not understand instructions. Judges act as gatekeepers and must decide whether an expert can present his or her views in a specific case. As dictated by Daubert v. Merrell Down Pharmaceuticals, Inc. in 1993, the judge must decide whether the expert’s claims have been tested, shown to be reliable, validated by peer review, and accepted by the scientific community. An extensive meta-analysis suggested that despite trepidations of undue influence of experts, juries appear to give moderate weight to expert testimony; experts are neither irrelevant nor overwhelming (Nietzel et al., 1999). Scholars also question whether jurors can sufficiently understand their task, particularly when following instructions written in legal jargon (Lieberman & Sales, 2000). Although researchers have demonstrated that rewriting jury instructions in simplified language can increase jurors’ comprehension (Lieberman & Sales, 2000), implementation of these changes in actual cases remains limited. Increasing acceptance of these findings will require continued endeavors on the part of psychologists and other scholars within and outside the legal system.

Difficulties in civil jury decision making include those described previously in this section as well as some additional challenges. In a typical civil case, the plaintiff sues the defendant for an injury, and jurors must decide whether the defendant is liable for the plaintiff’s injuries. If jurors find the defendant liable, they then assess monetary damages to be paid to the plaintiff by the defendant. Jurors’ tasks become particularly complex because their decisions of liability should be based only on the actions of the defendant but, if they find the defendant liable, the size of the damage award should be based only on the injuries of the plaintiff. Jurors, however, typically hear all of the information in a case before making decisions. The law requires that jurors use information about the defendant’s actions and ignore the information about the severity of the plaintiff’s injuries to decide liability and then use information about the degree of the injuries, but not the actions of the defendant, to decide damages. Jurors, contrary to legal expectations, use extralegal information about injuries to decide liability and use information about the defendant’s actions to decide damage awards (Greene & Bornstein, 2003).

If a defendant’s behavior is particularly malicious, jurors may award punitive damages to punish the defendant and to deter the defendant and others from engaging in such behavior in the future (Greene & Bornstein, 2003). The defendant’s wealth or ability to pay should also drive punitive damage awards. For punitive damages to meet these goals, they must be large enough to be significant to the defendant. Scholars of the legal system disagree regarding the possible influence of the severity of injuries in punitive damage awards, but in the 1996 case of BMW of North America, Inc. v. Gore, the U.S. Supreme Court addressed these conflicts and decided that punitive damages should have a reasonable relationship with the plaintiff’s actual or potential injuries (Robbennolt, 2002). Across all of these decisions, jurors receive little to no guidance regarding their damage awards (Greene & Bornstein, 2003). Future research will continue to explore the distinctions between legal expectations of jurors and jurors’ actual capabilities.

Future Directions

The field of psychology and the law continues to grow in depth and in breadth. Psychologists seek new ways to develop the topics described here. For example, as their understanding of juries grows, psychologists will continue to investigate more complex issues in jury decision making such as the structure of complex trials, other sources of extralegal influence on jurors’ comprehension, and the ways that proposed legal reforms can affect jury behavior. New areas will also continue to emerge. Psychologists will step further into questions about the law at the end of life. How do people choose someone to make their legal decisions in case of medical incapacitation? How should physicians, psychologists, and attorneys assess the integrity of the decisions of an older adult or a person with medically induced cognitive disabilities? The social context will also drive research areas. The prominence of criminal profiling in the media may continue to drive interest and increase research attention in research, practice, and education. The areas described in this research-paper elucidate only part of the story, and the field’s rapid growth has not showed signs of slowing.

Summary

This research-paper offered a concise overview of the field of psychology and the law. The effects of the legal system extend to citizens and noncitizens alike, and the power of the law to proscribe behavior suggests that it will be a central research topic for psychology into the indefinite future. Although the methods and goals of psychological science differ from those of the law in many important ways, researchers and lawmakers share similar goals. Broadly speaking, they want a more accurate and efficient legal system that better fits what psychologists have learned about human behavior. Students in this field have a wide variety of careers from which to choose. The dynamic history of the field attests to the potential for rapid change and the significant influence of productive individuals such as Loftus, Kassin, Greene, and Bornstein, to name only a few. The topic areas briefly described previously elucidate some possible areas, but the field is expanding rapidly, and new ideas and innovative research from today’s students will shape the future of the discipline.

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