not guilty: the psychology of crime investigations celine van g… · a vicious crime was committed...

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Not Guilty: The Psychology of Crime Investigations

Presented byDr Celine van GoldeFaculty of Science, School of Psychology

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Causes of wrongful convictions

https://www.innocenceproject.org/

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The tendency to search for or interpret information that

confirms your beliefs and ignore information that

contradicts it

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Confidence

Confidence inflates over time

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Memory is reconstructive

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Your memory of an event is

affected by many factors

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Memory stages

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“Obvious Factors”

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Memory stages

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The influence of questions and suggestions

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The Influence of questions and suggestions

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1 2 3 4 5

6 7 8 9

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Memory BlindnessWhen a person fails to perceive alterations made to

their previous memory reports (Cochran, Greenspan, Bogart, & Loftus, 2016).

Choice Blindness

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Recall Memory and Modality

vs

VS

Sagana, Sauerland, & Merckelbach (2017); Brown, Cullen & van Golde, (in prep)

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Method

N=67

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Results

67.1657.46 49.25

32.8442.54 50.75

0102030405060708090

100

Conc

urrent D

etectio

n

Retrospe

ctive

…

Overall

Detectio

n

Man

ipul

atio

ns (

%)

Memory Blindness

Memory blind Detecting37.5

43.38

28.03

41.67

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

Concurrent Detection Retrospective Detection

Misinfomation Detection Rate

Handrwiting Typing

9.93

19.85

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

Integration

Misinformation Integration Rate

Handrwiting Typing

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Further Factors

- Item similarity;

- Difficulty;

- Confidence;

- Online presentation;

/

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1. Voluntary False Confession

2. Coerced Compliant False Confession

3. Coerced Internalised False Confession

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First Impressions

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A vicious crime was committed on the 30th of August 2015. You will now see photos of different people. For each person, on a scale from 0 to 200, please indicate how likely is it that the depicted person committed the

crime.

A vicious rape was committed on the 30th of August 2015. You will now see photos of different people. For each person, on a scale from 0 to 200, please indicate how likely is it that the depicted person committed the crime

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First Impressions

Testing the Steven Avery Effect: Are Exonerees at an Increased Risk of Being Convicted of a New Offense? Smalarz, Melishkevich, BA, Muñoz, & Shelton, (2020)

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What do we learn from this?

Overhaul of various police and trial procedures

Legal Reform

Focus on preventing

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Thank you

Any questions:

celine.vangolde@sydney.edu.au

@celinevangolde

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Overall Remarks

–Memory Blindness is a robust finding for recall memory (when an experimenter is present)

– It does not appear that recall modality affects the occurrence as much as specific task details/requirements

–This indicates a true issue within applied settings