Psychology - Forensic Psychology - Flashcards in A Level and IB Psychology

1. Which of these statements does not describe Pennington and Hastie (1988) study that supports the claim that story order has the most powerful influence when persuading a jury?

When prosecution used story order and defence used witness order 78% of participants cam up with guilty verdict
There are two DV's- namely, whether the participants thought the defence was guilty or not, and how confident they were in this verdict which was rated on a 5-point scale.
If the driver said he was insured and the judge ruled this inadmissable and told the jury to disregard this, the average award to V was increased to $46,000. This suggests that jurors attach added significance to banned info.
Results showed story order was more likely to elict the desired verdict.
When the defence used story order and prosecution used witness order this dropped to 31% guilty verdict.

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Self serving bias- Linking your successes to yourself and failures to outside forces
Internal attributions-explaining behaviour due to yourself
Rational attributions- explaining behaviour due to rational and understandable reasons
External attributions- explaining behaviours due to outside forces

The belief is that "an innocent person would never confess to a crime she didnt commit even if confronted with false physical evidence of involvement
Research found some specialist groups such as the secret service (64%), CIA (73%) and Sheriffs(67%) were better at detecting lies. However typically use students to lie so reduces genuine cues. When stakes were upped was easier to detect lies.
Review suggested on average 57% of lies were detected which is not far above chance.
Believes that "interrogation suspectiblity" explains coerced internalised confessions.

Individual confessed because they see it as more desirable than the alternative of being persistently or violently questioned. Knows they havent committed the crime.
There is no police pressure and in which individuals voluntarily go to the police to confess. May be due to mental illness or desire to protect someone.
Confessed because they come to believe they have committed the crime, this is based on "memory distrust syndrome" where they begin to doubt own memories. Typically occur in vulnerable suspects.

After listening to the facts the P's were made an individual verdict. They were then taken to a rooms with a table which had four seats at the sides and one at the top.
P's seated around a table in a room and asked to look at 3 lines of different lengths. Then asked in turn which of the three lines was the same length as the 'standard' line.
The p's were shown a series of lines and always answered in the same order (real P answered last of second to last)
The confederates were told to answer incorrectly on 12/18 trails

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