Interesting facts from the edX class

• In the FBI’s typology of offenders, an offender may appear ‘mixed’ in terms of being simultaneously organised and disorganised if elements of the situation took them by surprise when they were committing the offence. 
• The results of the Pinizotto and Finkel (1990) study demonstrates that in terms of multiple choice responding about a case and in picking the perpetrator from a line up, professionally trained profilers do not outperform non-profilers. Professionally trainer profilers do better in write up compared with non-profilers. 
• Professional profilers only outperformed non-profilers on the sexual offense case. Professional profilers did not outperform non-profilers on the homicide case.
• In the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Analysis approach to offender profiling, the ‘signature’ of the offender is a deliberate action – such as the taking of a key from the victim’s house – that serves no obvious purpose in the committing of the crime. The signature is an individualised or specific way of offending that the FBI in their Criminal Investigative Analysis approach suggests tells you about the personality of the offender. This may be useful in linking this crime to other crimes where the same signature has been seen.
• The Investigative Psychology approach suggests that the interactional behaviour of offenders when offending is consistent with their interactional style when they are not offending. Interpersonal coherence, one element’s of Canter’s five factor model for interpreting a crime scene, suggests that the way in which people interact with one another in their everyday lives is so well rehearsed and ingrained that it influences all their interactions with others, including the way in which they interact with their victims while offending.
• The Investigative Psychology approach states that where offender’s offend is not random. They select the time and location of their offending for a reason and investigators may be able to infer something about the offender based on their choices about when and where to offend.
• The emphasis in profiles produced through Criminal Investigative Analysis and Investigative Psychology differ. The Criminal Investigative Analysis profiles emphasise the offender’s likely motivation and what characteristics this is associated with. The profiles created by Investigative Psychology tend to focus on the offender’s characteristics and the offender’s likely location.
• Much like offender profiling, geographical profiling cannot tell you precisely where the base of an offender is (i.e., their home). However it can help narrow down a search area by identifying the most likely area in which the offender’s base will be found.
• It is suggested that offender’s may show a preference for crime sites closer to their home. It is at these sites that offender’s may feel more knowledgeable or in control. However in their offences they may avoid a ‘buffer zone’ around their home or base where they may feel that they would be recognised.
• Mental maps are internal representations of an area and reflect how the person typically interacts with their environment. The way you interact with a given environment will impact on the areas in that environment that you note as significant. For example, if you catch public transport to work or college then you will provide more detail about public transport stops or stations than someone who drives to work or college.

• Brigham and Bothwell (1983) showed that people estimated eyewitness identification accuracy to be between 51 and 71 per cent. In reality, the actual accuracy of eyewitnesses was significantly and substantially lower at between 13 and 32 per cent.
• The ‘wrong time slice’ error is when people are asked to retrieve memories about everyday events and they respond with a description of an event from a completely different time.
• Narrative construction is the idea that, when generating a narrative account of an event, people sometimes reconstruct gaps in the story based on a script or a general idea of what usually happens in a situation.
• Narrative construction is one possible explanation as to why some people may misremember what they actually saw when a crime was being committed.
• If someone can’t remember something then it can be a failure at any of the three stages of memory – encoding, storage, or retrieval. Memory may fail because the individual never had the information in the first place, so it could not be encoded. They may have encoded the information but have subsequently forgotten it, so storage has failed. Or they may still have the memory but no effective way to retrieve it.
• The weapon focus effect suggests that when a weapon is present, the witness’s memory of the offender’s physical appearance is impaired because the witness’s attention is drawn to the weapon and away from the offender’s face. While the evidence to support this effect is inconsistent, it is nonetheless not the case that memory is typically enhanced by the presence of a weapon.
• Research has demonstrated that witnesses exposed to misinformation about a crime consistently incorporate that false information into their subsequent account of the crime.
• Smith (1983) found that most laboratory studies of forensic hypnosis failed to demonstrate its effectiveness.
• Asking eyewitnesses to recall all the events surrounding a crime – including details not relevant to solving the crime – can help improve recall of the relevant details. This is because activating memories of irrelevant details may help cue recall for the relevant memories.
• The encoding specificity principle has been used as the basis for memory retrieval techniques used in the cognitive interview to help witnesses maximise their chances of recalling relevant details of a crime. In practice, this involves asking eyewitnesses to recall everything they possibly can about the crime situation, including irrelevant details, because this will increase the chance of them remembering relevant details.
• Loftus demonstrated how leading questions can affect the accuracy of eyewitness recall. For example, using the word “smash” in a question about a traffic accident made it more likely that eyewitnesses would subsequently report that there was glass on the road when this was not true.

• Photofit techniques that involve eyewitnesses reconstructing a face feature by feature typically yield a poor likeness of the target face because they are based on a fundamentally wrong assumption about how people recognise faces.
• Research shows that recognition of objects that we recognise on a holistic basis – such as faces – becomes much more impaired by upside down presentation than recognition of objects that we recognise mainly on the basis of features, such as houses or airplanes.
• Research shows that conducting a line up using a double-blind procedure – that is where you ensure the administrator does not know who the suspect is – results in better outcomes, in terms of increased accuracy of identification, than line ups where the administrator does know who the suspect is.
• When the suspect was present the bias present or absent in the instructions did not matter in terms of the chance of correctly identifying the offender. However when the offender was not in the line up, the use of unbiased instructions (the suspect may or may not be present) significantly decreased the chance of a false identification in comparison to when biased instructions were used.
• Evidence from laboratory research suggests that sequential line-up procedures result in fewer false identifications than simultaneous line up procedures. Sequential line up procedures require that the eyewitness makes an absolute judgment. That is, they compare each person in the line up to their memory of the offender. In contrast, simultaneous line up procedures encourage the eyewitness to make a relative judgment of line up members in comparison to one another
• Brewer and colleagues demonstrated that, using certain specific procedures, an eyewitness’s confidence can be a good predictor of their accuracy. Unfortunately these procedures are unlikely to be accepted in a courtroom context, though they may be useful during an investigation
• The longer that an eyewitness views an offender, the stronger the relationship between their confidence in the accuracy of a subsequent identification judgment and the actual accuracy of that judgment. Although overall the relationship between eyewitness accuracy and confidence is poor, there are some situations or circumstances in which eyewitness confidence may have a stronger positive association with accuracy. One of these circumstances is when an eyewitness views an offender for a longer time.
• It is best to use foils that match the eyewitness’s description of the suspect. If the foils that look similar to the suspect do not have a characteristic that the eyewitness described then the eyewitness may automatically rule them out. This effectively reduces the number of people that they have to choose between in the line up and means that they are more likely to pick the suspect by chance.
• Eyewitness confidence in their identification can be easily increased or decreased. This may occur through, for example, the person conducting the line up providing the eyewitness with encouraging or discouraging feedback after they have made their identification.
• Brewer’s proposed line-up procedure involves presenting a line-up sequentially and asking witnesses to rate their confidence that each line-up member was the perpetrator. In Brewer’s procedure it is the confidence ratings that are processed to determine whether the suspect is likely to be the perpetrator. When this procedure has been tested head to head with a more traditional line up procedure it was found to substantially outperform the traditional line up procedure.

• Research conducted using a fictional trial with mock jurors showed that the presence of a confession resulted in a higher conviction rate than an eyewitness’ identification of the suspect. Kassin and Neumann (1997) found that the presence of a confession resulted in a 73% conviction rate in a fictional trial involving mock jurors. In comparison, an eyewitness’ identification of the suspect resulted in only a 59% conviction rate.
• Research shows that 50% of participants will convict a suspect who confesses even when they know that the confession was obtained using ‘high pressure’ interrogation tactics such as making the suspect feel under pressure to confess. Kassin and Sukel (1997) found that the rate of conviction was even greater (at 63%) when participants were told that only low pressure (stress but no physical discomfort, verbal abuse or threat) had been applied on the suspect. The conviction rate when there was no confession at all was only 19%.
• In a coerced internalised false confession an innocent person actually comes to believe that they have committed the crime as a result of the interrogation or interview.
• In the Inbau, Reid and Buckley’s nine-step approach to interrogation, the second step of psychological theme development will differ depending on the emotionality of the suspect. If the suspect is emotional, the interrogator may provide a moral excuse for the crime in order to minimise the seriousness of the crime. Inbau, Reid and Buckley suggest a different tactic at this step for unemotional suspects. Here they would use a maximisation approach in which the seriousness of the offence would be emphasised.
• Research suggests that increased voice pitch is the only non-verbal behaviour reliably associated with deception. Many other non-verbal behaviours that are thought to be associated with deception are, in fact, not reliably associated with being deceptive.
• In the Kassin and Kiechel (1996) study the tendency to comply with a request to confess to a crime that the participant had not committed was affected by the presence of a witness and uncertainty. While increased uncertainty led to a higher rate of false confession, the presence of a witness also increased the rate of false confession. The results of this study showed that the presence of a witness alone was sufficient to significantly increase the rate of compliance and internalised confessions, even in the low vulnerability (slow pace of typing) condition.
• Unfortunately the association between confidence in ability to detect lies and accuracy in detecting lies is not strong.
• Bond and DePaulo (2006) reported average lie detection accuracy for ordinary people of 54%, so just above chance. This rate is not uniformly higher even among those people employed in occupations where lie detection may be seen as important (e.g. customs officials).
• Meissner and colleagues found that interrogation techniques significantly increased the chance of obtaining a false confession from an innocent participant. When the interrogation method was directly compared with the information seeking approach, the information gathering technique was found to elicit a greater proportion of true confessions while significantly reducing the likelihood of false confessions.

• In the event that the jury cannot reach a decision, the judge discharges the jury. A retrial with a new jury may be held.
• While many countries have community involvement in the determination of guilt of serious criminal offences through inviting members of the general public to sit on juries made up of lay people or lay people and professional judges, many countries around the world have no community involvement in the determination of guilt of serious criminal offences.
• Juries can be used for both criminal and civil trials. In some jurisdictions, such as the United States of America, civil jury trials are relatively common. In other jurisdictions, such as Australia, civil jury trials are quite rare, and we generally only hear about the criminal jury trials.
• Landsman and Rakos’s (1994) study showed that both judges and community members (or potential jurors) were negatively influenced by the inadmissible prejudicial information that was present in some of their experimental conditions. This suggests that both judges and jurors may be susceptible to some of the same cognitive biases, and legal training did not seem to protect against these.
• In some jurisdictions, such as in some states in the United States of America, potential jurors can be asked to complete lengthy questionnaires that are designed to assess prior attitudes and potential biases that jurors might hold.
• A peremptory challenge to a juror is a challenge without reason. At the time of making the challenge, the lawyers only have limited information about the prospective juror (e.g. their occupation, residential area), and will often make the challenge based on how the juror appears to them in the courtroom. In some jurisdictions there are limitations on how peremptory challenges can be used. For example, in the United States of America, you cannot use this type of challenge on the basis of race (Batson v. Kentucky, 1986).
• Research shows that any individual juror biases are quite a minor influence on the verdict. This is because individual jurors do not decide the verdict, but rather the jury as a group arrives at the verdict.
• The research of Diamond and colleagues (1998) and Hastie and colleagues (1983) suggests that any individual juror characteristic accounts for only 2% of the variation in verdicts, and combined, juror characteristics account for only 5% of the variation in verdicts. Visher (1987) found that if there is strong evidence against the defendant, jury composition does not appear to matter at all.
• Research shows that exposure to negative pre-trial publicity can cause jurors to view the defendant more harshly and result in more guilty verdicts compared to when jurors are not exposed to such publicity.
• Research has demonstrated that while instructions are an easy remedy to any bias that exposure to media stories may cause in jurors, they are generally ineffective.