Cross-examining Child Witnesses – A Double Edged Sword

A recent paper published in the journal Psychology, Public Policy and Law entitled ‘The Effects of Cross-examination on Children’s Coached Reports” outlines a study conducted on children who were asked to lie about an event they witnessed.

The study hoped to test the effectiveness of cross-examination  on child witnesses in order to counter ‘coaching’ by adults – a common allegation in child sexual abuse cases.  As can be seen below, although the cross-examination was found effective in elucidating the truth from children who were coached; it also had the unintended effect of changing the testimony of children who weren’t coached (the controls).

ABSTRACT:

Defense lawyers frequently claim that children’s allegations of sexual abuse are false and are the product of coaching. As physical evidence in such cases is rare, the detection of false allegations is often dependent on the legal systems’ truth-promoting mechanisms. Wigmore (1904/1974) claimed that cross-examination is the most effective of these mechanisms. This laboratory-based study investigated whether children can be coached to falsely allege a transgression and whether cross-examination promotes truthfulness from children who initially comply with coaching. One hundred and 49 kindergarten (M_age = 6 years 0 months) and Grade 3 (M_age = 8 years 10 months) students participated individually in a staged event. Participants were allocated to 1 of 3 experimental conditions. In the first condition, children were coached to allege an unwitnessed transgression, in the second condition, they were coached to deny a witnessed transgression, and in the third condition, they witnessed a transgression and were not coached. Participants then underwent a direct examination (Interview 1) followed by a repeat direct examination or a cross-examination (Interview 2). Although most children complied with coaching in Interview 1, this coaching was undermined by cross-examination in Interview 2. Consistent with Wigmore’s (1904/1974) claim, cross-examination was more effective than a repeat direct examination at eliciting true transgression reports from children who initially lied in accordance with coaching. Contrary to Wigmore’s (1904/1974) claim, however, cross-examination led children who were not coached to recant their initial true allegations and reduced children’s accuracy for neutral events. Implications for policy and future research are discussed.

Extralegal Factors in Jury Decision-making

From the excellent Psychology of Criminal Justice online course at the University of Queensland.

Implicit Bias and Moral Responsibility

To what extent are our unconscious prejudices part of our moral character? Professor Neil Levy takes a look.

ABSTRACT:

Matt King and Peter Carruthers have recently argued that consciousness of our attitudes cannot play a role in distinguishing actions for which we are responsible from those for which we are not, because there are no conscious attitudes. This claim, in turn, is defended on the basis of Carruthers’ argument that access to the content of our attitudes is interpretive rather than introspective. In the first, briefer, part of this paper, I argue that however we come to be aware of the content of our attitudes, whether we are aware of this content makes a morally significant difference. In the second, longer, part of the paper I consider the implications of Carruthers’ view for moral responsibility for actions caused by implicit attitudes. We appear regularly to be aware of the content of our implicit attitudes; moreover, if Carruthers is right, we discover this content by much the same route as we discover the content of our explicit attitudes. There seems, therefore, to be a case for treating implicit and explicit attitudes alike, so far as moral responsibility is concerned. I argue that awareness of the content of our implicit attitudesis not sufficient for moral responsibility for actions caused by them. Implicit attitudes impact on behavior in ways that differ systematically from the way explicit attitudes impact on behavior. I argue that attitudes that are reportable (as propositional attitudes) have broader and more integrated structures than attitudes that cannot be reported, and that this entails that the former have a role in integrating behavior lacked by the latter.Because moral agency and responsibility requires a high degree of unity on behalf of theagent, this difference makes a morally significant difference.

More ‘Gut’ Than Analysis – The Nature of Fingerprinting Expertise

Full article available at PLoS ONE Journal here. First reported on ABC Online.

ABSTRACT:

Expert decision making often seems impressive, even miraculous. People with genuine expertise in a particular domain can perform quickly and accurately, and with little information. In the series of experiments presented here, we manipulate the amount of “information” available to a group of experts whose job it is to identify the source of crime scene fingerprints. In Experiment 1, we reduced the amount of information available to experts by inverting fingerprint pairs and adding visual noise. There was no evidence for an inversion effect—experts were just as accurate for inverted prints as they were for upright prints—but expert performance with artificially noisy prints was impressive. In Experiment 2, we separated matching and nonmatching print pairs in time. Experts were conservative, but they were still able to discriminate pairs of fingerprints that were separated by five-seconds, even though the task was quite different from their everyday experience. In Experiment 3, we separated the print pairs further in time to test the long-term memory of experts compared to novices. Long-term recognition memory for experts and novices was the same, with both performing around chance. In Experiment 4, we presented pairs of fingerprints quickly to experts and novices in a matching task. Experts were more accurate than novices, particularly for similar nonmatching pairs, and experts were generally more accurate when they had more time. It is clear that experts can match prints accurately when there is reduced visual information, reduced opportunity for direct comparison, and reduced time to engage in deliberate reasoning. These findings suggest that non-analytic processing accounts for a substantial portion of the variance in expert fingerprint matching accuracy. Our conclusion is at odds with general wisdom in fingerprint identification practice and formal training, and at odds with the claims and explanations that are offered in court during expert testimony.

Are Corporations Viewed as People? Measuring Neurological Responses to Corporate Moral Judgments

Another great study in moral psychology, was recently published in Social Neuroscience looking at the neural correlates of moral judgements in individuals who viewed vignettes about individual and corporate moral decisions. Full article accessible here.

ABSTRACT:

To investigate whether the legal concept of “corporate personhood” mirrors an inherent similarity in the neural processing of the actions of corporations and people, we measured brain responses to vignettes about corporations and people while participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging. We found that anti-social actions of corporations elicited more intense negative emotions and that pro-social actions of people elicited more intense positive emotions. However, the networks underlying the moral decisions about corporations and people are strikingly similar, including regions of the canonical theory of mind network. In analyzing the activity in these networks, we found differences in the emotional processing of these two types of vignettes: neutral actions of corporations showed neural correlates that more closely resembled negative actions than positive actions. Collectively, these findings indicate that our brains understand and analyze the actions of corporations and people very similarly, with a small emotional bias against corporations.

Implicit Bias, Discrimination and Implications for Policing

The video below is presented by science communicator Hank Green and explores the role of implicit bias and discrimination on human behaviour. It opens with a discussion of the fatal shooting of Amadou Diallo by four New York City police officers, who opened fire when they saw Mr Diallo rummaging through his pockets on his doorstep.

*Embedding stopped, you can view the video here.

Neurolaw Memes #1

 The Libet Experiment and Volition

Choice Blindness Experiments 

 Anchoring Effects and the Judiciary 

Biological Effects of Drug Addiction

Five Papers on Judicial Decision Making

For a very long time academics tended to look at judicial decision making with a view that  judges were exceptional human beings: rational scholars who apply legal principles to facts diligently and without bias.

Luckily, this ‘idealised’ image of the judiciary has fallen out of favour, and we are seeing the development of more ‘realist’ and cognitive-based scholarship amongst jurists.

Here are a few recent papers which apply insights from cognitive science and technology to judicial decisions:

• Professors Teichman and Zamir from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem provide a broad overview of the behavioural literature applying to judicial decision making in their article included in the upcoming Oxford Handbook of Behavioural Economics and the Law. They explore general theories of judicial decision making as well as the effect of cognitive biases on legal judgments.

• Professor Negowetti from Valparaiso University Law School, in her article hosted at SSRN, explores how an increased emphasis on ‘judicial empathy’ — the cognitive capacity to imagine the perspective of another person — may be a tool to mitigate the inevitable implicit biases each judge brings to the bench.

• Over at Social Neuroscience, a paper published by Professors Capestany and Harris look to explore the effect of disgust and biological descriptions on legal decision-making using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to map brain responses. The study expands on previous research which indicates that crimes involving ‘disgusting’ details tend to get harsher punishments by judges. The neuroimaging study found that brain regions active during logical reasoning are less active if crimes involve disgust and biological descriptions.

• A light-hearted paper by John Campbell in the Brooklyn Law Review details ‘Why Cognitive Science Proves The Emperors Have No Robes’ – in other words, why studies in cognitive dissonance show that judge’s tend to skew their rationalisations to bring about desired outcomes.

• Finally, a paper by various authors in the journal Court Review explores how implicit biases, in particular racial biases, affect judicial decisions and what can be done to mitigate this phenomena.