Exam notes SP637 Forensic Psychology PDF

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Exam notes SP637 Forensic PsychologyMultiple Choice Questions – there are 45 of them.Exam Duration: 2 hours in duration.Lecture weeks are to be covered by this examination: 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11.Recordings of lectures, lecture slides, core textbook chapters relevant to each lecture, extra readi...

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Exam notes SP637 Forensic Psychology Multiple Choice Questions – there are 45 of them. Exam Duration: 2 hours in duration. Lecture weeks are to be covered by this examination: 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11. Recordings of lectures, lecture slides, core textbook chapters relevant to each lecture, extra reading material (e.g. journal articles) posted on moodle for each lecture.

Week 1 Morality, Social Control and the Law Vauclair& Fischer (2011) Classification of morality   

Whether cultural values predict how actions considered wrong or correct - vary culturally Drawn on evolutionary theories Collectivist society stronger views on morality

Dishonest-Illegal 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Someone accepting a bribe in the course of their duties Claiming welfare benefits you are not entitled to Avoiding a fare on public transport Cheating on taxes if you have a chance Suicide Physician-assisted suicide for a person who is terminally ill and wants to die

Personal-Sexual 1. 2. 3. 4.

Prostitution Homosexuality Divorce Abortion

Findings:  

Attitudes towards dishonest-illegal issues = universal values Attitudes towards personal-sexual issues = cultural values

Eg. Halloween costumes - Mental asylum patient, association makes certain act immoral. Cultural value orientations:  

Autonomy Emphasizes a form of personal right to pursue one’s own self-fulfilment. Embeddedness Emphasises duties and social obligations.

What is crime = Crime comes from the Sanskrit word ‘karma’ – which signifies action through which an individual may be judged Explaining crime: Historical background:   

Pre-modern justice systems were based on religion and spirituality Punishment was harsh, and often focused on the physical body so as to drive out the demons (Voldet al., 1998). These laws were also mostly applied to the poor who were not members of the ruling aristocracy - In order to protect their wealth, the ruling aristocracy decreed most property crimes as punishable by death

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Rise of modern society (i.e., the demise of medieval society) led to changes in thinking about criminal behaviour. This change was characterised by the rise of secular rational thinking: For example,

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Human ideas Questioning the aristocracy Scientific revolution (17c)

Criminal Law = Currently – criminals are those who violate the laws of the State For a certain act to be considered a crime:  

ActusRea: Voluntary perpetration of crime MensRea: Intention to commit the crime (premeditation)

Can you think of examples where either of these may not be present?   

Under medication - intoxication Self-defence - George Zimmer case - shot boy in self defence Use of element of the law to led not guilty

How laws were devised = Laws developed due to universal concern with harmful behaviour – evolutionary origins (Ellis, 1987) Crimes separated by: MALA IN SE– Natural Law - Society principles Examples include murder, rape, assault, theft Norms – MALA PROHIBITA – Human Law - Local state (Laws a s social control) Examples include traffic violations, illegal drug use, prostitution, gambling, copyright infringement ----- Wrong only because a statute makes it so Crime is that which interferes with our shared moral agency in the way we choose to live (Young, 1981). Obedience to Laws and Norms   

Social psychological evidence of obedience = Milgram (1964); Asch (1951) Diffusion of responsibility Obedience of authority

What if there is a conflict between law and morality? Kelman & Hamilton (1989) – My Lai massacre – 500 civilians killed

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Exclusion of morality from everyday morality

1. Rule – power of authority 2. Role – legitimacy of authority 3. Value – guided by moral principles 

Moral reasoning refers to how individuals’ reason about and justify behaviour with reference to moral issues.

Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Reasoning: Pre-conventional  

Moral reasoning is based on avoiding punishment and obeying perceived authority figures. Moral reasoning is egocentric, with the person’s own needs being of greatest importance. Reasoning is based on the perceived balance of rewards and punishment.

Conventional  

Moral reasoning is determined by other people’s needs, with personal relationships assuming importance. Moral reasoning is based on maintaining society’s rules and laws in order to keep society in order.

Post-conventional  

Moral reasoning is underpinned by an understanding that society’s laws are a contract between the individual and society. However, under certain circumstances these laws can be broken. Moral reasoning is determined by self-chosen ethical principles that are consistent over time and situations, and these may overrule society’s laws if they come into conflict with each other.

EG: Heinze dilemma 

The theory has been revised by Gibbs (2003;2010) - sociomoral reasoning o Role of of social perspective taking and empathy are given more significant

Gibbs and his colleagues (1979; Gibbs, Basinger, & Fuller, 1992) proposed a sociomoral stage theory regarding the reasons or justifications people give for their behaviour, and these revisions have been shown to have cross-cultural validity (Gibbs, Basinger, Grime, & Snarey, 2007).

However, Kohlbergian and Gibbian approaches to moral development are nested within the cognitive developmental domain, and others have adopted alternative theoretical approaches to moral development, nested within the social domain

So, might there be a relationship between moral reasoning and moral conduct?  

There is no clear relationship between stage of development and offending behaviour (Jurkovic, 1980) Criminal behaviour can be justified at any level of moral development (Blackburn, 1993) – for example: Stage 1 = if no punishment results crime Stage 3 = if relationships are preserved Stage 5/6 = protects human rights

Facts:      

Juvenile offenders have lower moral maturity (Blasi, 1980) Moral reasoning is lower but moral judgement is not (Emler, Heather, & Winton, 1978) No differences between juvenile offenders and control group Full range of stages in delinquent populations (Jurkovic, 1980) Variability in moral reasoning and personality, Characteristics of background - affect whether they will commit crime. Lower moral development – more prudent crimes (Thornton & Reid, 1982). Serious crimes are usually not spontaneous, requires more moral reasoning.

Morality is a social skill that varies with context (Emler & Hogan, 1981) Moral maturity of university students (Denton & Krebs, 1990)           

Moral Maturity of University Students 40 males and 40 females recruited at bars and parties Moral maturity assessed at bar/party, and again a few days later at university Asked if they would drive had they consumed alcohol. Blood alcohol level assessed by breathalyser after each interview, and level at bar/party used to create two groups – high alcohol and low alcohol Goal to assess whether drinking alcohol would affect moral reasoning. Poor judgment in bar compared to when in a formal environment. Moral Agency and Moral Disengagement They found - All but 1 of the participants who had driven to the bar drove back home despite being over the blood alcohol limit. Morality is self-sanctioning and may disengage to allow immoral behaviour People see themselves as ethical and just. If they go on to behave unethically or unjustly, they invoke methods of morally disengaging, to justify or explain this behaviour.

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Studied by Bandura (2002) Socio-cognitive theory of moral disengagement (Bandura, 2002)

Socio-cognitive theory of moral disengagement (Bandura, 2002):  

Social learning theory (Bandura, 1977) Moral cognition (Piaget, 1932)

Moral disengagement (Bandura, 2002)   

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Socio-cognitive theory of moral disengagement People experience moral conflicts when they come across valuable benefits requiring immoral behaviour “cognitive restructuring of inhumane conduct into a benign or worthy behaviour” (Bandura, 2002, p. 101) Diffusion of responsibility - Attribution of blame - victim blaming Moral justification Euphemistic language Advantageous comparison Distortion of consequences Dehumanization Attribution of blame 

We often morally disengage in many behaviours - some may seem worse than others e.g. downloading music illegally

Reason for this: Perceived injustices: For example  Mis-selling (e.g., insurance policies)  Hidden charges  Over-priced premiums, etc.  Convenience  

People feel vulnerable: profit reigns – decrease of legitimacy Fear of becoming a victim of others’ shady practices – e.g., car repairs, negation of insurance claims

Legal cynicism (Sampson & Bartusch, 1998):    

People feel disengaged from legal norms See others as disengaged from legal norms Legal norms have no validity Legal norms are useless in guiding behaviour in marketplace

Social information processing theory: 

Explain aggression and delinquent behaviour in order to explain individual differences in their responses.

Crick and Dodge (1994) 6 step model explaining how individuals perceive their social world and process information about it        

Encoding of social cues Interpretation and mental representation of the situation Clarification of goals Access or construction of responses for situations Choice of responses Performance of chosen responses. These steps can be performed simultaneously not always step by step All steps are influenced by social knowledge such as schemas

Reading Selective Moral Disengagement in the Exercise of Moral Agency ALBERT BANDURA Moral agency is embedded in a broader socio-cognitive self-theory encompassing affective self-regulatory mechanisms rooted in personal standards linked to selfsanctions.  Moral functioning is thus governed by self-reactive selfhood rather than by dispassionate abstract reasoning. The self-regulatory mechanisms governing moral conduct do not come into play unless they are activated and there are many psychosocial mechanisms by which moral self-sanctions are selectively disengaged from inhumane conduct.  The moral disengagement may centre on the cognitive restructuring of inhumane conduct into a benign or worthy one by moral justification, sanitising language and exonerative social comparison; disavowal of personal agency in the harm one causes by diffusion or displacement of responsibility; disregarding or minimising the injurious effects of one’s actions; and attribution of blame to, and dehumanisation of, those who are victimised.  Social cognitive theory adopts an interactionist perspective to morality in which moral n nactions are the products of the reciprocal interplay of personal and social inuences. 

Mechanisms of Moral Disengagement  

The disengagement may centre on reducing harmful conduct as honourable by moral justification, exonerating social comparison and sanitising language. It may focus on agency of action so that perpetrators can minimise their role in causing One set of disengagement practices operates on the reconstruction of the behaviour itself. People do not usually engage in harmful conduct until they have justified, to themselves, the morality of their actions.

Euphemistic Labelling 

Language shapes thought patterns on which actions are based.

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Euphemistic language is used widely to make harmful conduct respectable and to reduce personal responsibility for it (Lutz, 1987).

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People behave much more cruelly when assaultive actions are given a sanitised label than when they are called aggression (Diener et al., 1975). In an insightful analysis of the language of non-responsibility, Gambino (1973) identified the different varieties of euphemisms. One form relies on sanitising language. The civilians the bombs kill is linguistically converted to “collateral damage”. he agentless passive voice serves as another exonerative tool. It creates the appearance that reprehensible acts are the work of nameless forces, rather than people (Bolinger, 1982). It is as though people are moved mechanically but are not really the agents of their own acts. The specialised jargon of a legitimate enterprise is also misused to lend respectability to an illegitimate one. In the vocabulary of the law breakers in Nixon’s administration, criminal conspiracy became a “game plan”, and the conspirators were “team players”, like the best of sportsmen.

Displacement of Responsibility 

Moral control operates most strongly when people acknowledge that they are contributors to harmful outcomes. The second set of disengagement practises operates by obscuring or minimising the agentive role in the harm one causes. People will behave in ways they normally repudiate if a legitimate authority accepts responsibility for the effects of their conduct (Milgram, 1974; Diener, 1977).

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Under displaced responsibility, they view their actions as stemming from the dictates of authorities rather than being personally responsible for them. Because they are not the actual agent of their actions, they are spared self-condemning reactions.

Diffusion of Responsibility  

The exercise of moral control is also weakened when personal agency is obscured by diffusing responsibility for detrimental behaviour. Kelman (1973) documents the different ways in which personal agency gets obscured by social diffusion of responsibility. Responsibility can be diffused by division of labour. Subdivided tasks seem harmless in themselves. People shift their attention from the meaning of what they are doing to the details of their specific job.

Disregard or Distortion of Consequences  

Other ways of weakening moral control operate by minimising, disregarding or distorting the effects of one’s action. When people pursue activities that harm others, they avoid facing the harm they cause or minimise it. If minimisation does not work, the evidence of harm can be discredited. As long as the harmful results of one’s conduct are ignored, minimised, distorted or disbelieved there is little reason for self-censure to be activated.

Dehumanisation 

The strength of moral self-censure depends on how the perpetrators regard the people they mistreat.

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To perceive another as human activates empathetic reactions through perceived similarity (Bandura, 1992).

Attribution of Blame 

Blaming one’s adversaries or circumstances is another expedient that serves selfexonerating purposes. People view themselves as faultless victims driven to injurious conduct by forcible provocation.

Dual Nature of Moral Agency   

The exercise of moral agency has dual aspects—inhibitive and proactive (Bandura, 1999). The inhibitive form is manifested in the power to refrain from behaving inhumanely. The proactive form of morality is expressed in the power to behave humanely. In this higher-order morality, people do good things as well as refrain from doing bad things.

Disengagement in Everyday Life  

Moral disengagement mechanisms have been examined most extensively in military, and political violence. The products of the tobacco industry kill about 450,000 Americans annually (McGinnis & Foege, 1993). The aggressive marketing of cigarettes worldwide will produce a global epidemic of lung cancer killing millions. For years the tobacco industry disputed the view that nicotine is addictive, and that smoking is a major contributor to lung cancer.

Concluding Remarks   

The massive threats to human welfare stem mainly from deliberate acts of principle, rather than from unrestrained acts of impulse. Snow observed, “More hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience, than in the name of rebellion.” Given many psychological devices for disengaging moral control, societies cannot rely entirely on individuals

Week 2 Interviews with child eyewitnesses Short term and long-term memory •Short-term memory is a temporary store for information which may then move to long-term memory •Long-term memory stores information which is never lost •Retrieval from long-term memory may be adversely affected by delay and interfering information Non-declarative & declarative memory •Non-declarative memory (procedural) does not require conscious awareness of remembering •It involves our ability to unconsciously perform previously acquired sensorimotor behaviours (e.g. walking, swimming, driving, zipping one’s coat when cold) •Knowledge here is mostly expressed by actions rather than consciously recalling an experience •Declarative memory involves consciously recalling explicit information about facts and events •It is what we usually mean by the term memory in everyday language •It is subdivided into semantic and episodic memory Episodic memory (e.g. Schacter & Tulving, 1994; Tulving, 1983) •Episodic memory is imperative in eyewitness events •It receives and stores information about the temporal aspects of events and the temporalspatial relationships of events (e.g. I went to Paris for my honeymoon two years ago) •The ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘where’, and ‘when’ of an event •It allows to mentally relive an experience Episodic and semantic memory •Semantic memory is imperative for the use of language and refers to one’s general knowledge about facts (e.g. the capital of France is Paris; after spring comes summer) •It is less affected by loss or transformation •Witnesses are expected to recall specific details the ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘where’, and ‘when’

•Attempt to recall the context in which a memory was originally encoded •Encoding specificity principle (Tulving, 1983; Tulving & Thomson, 1973): ‘the greater the similarity between the certain features of an event at the time of encoding and the prompts available at the retrieval stage, the more efficient recall will be’ (e.g. photographs of a honeymoon) •Semantic memory may involve some forensically relevant content, but not enough to support an investigation -- as the information provided can be simple human facts •E.g. ‘Uncle John’s pee pee can stand up’may be purely semantic or the child’s experience (Goodman & Melinder, 2007) - Could be anatomical a fact or experience •The legal system requires details (e.g. time, place, people) → episodic memory Remembering past events includes 3 mnemonic processes: 1. Encoding(learning information by linking it to previously acquired knowledge) 2. Storage(maintaining this information over time) 3. Retrieval(accessing this information when required) Loftus (1979, 1996)   

Acquisition = Information encoded about original event Retention = Period of time between event & recollection Retrieval = Recollection of stored information

Perceiving Events (1) Acquisition Exposure Time: •Remembering more accurate when exposure time for target to be remembered is longer (e.g. Laugherty et al., 1971). Event Salience: •Some details just catch our attention more than others. Prior Expectations: •We recall expectations, not always the truth – stereotyping. (Crimes related on race stereotypes,or weapon expectation). Perceiving Events (2) Retention Length of Time:

•Ebbinghaus(1885) – Forgetting Curve (see Loftus, 1996); •Shepard (1967); –Picture recognition, 2hours, 3 days, 1 week, 4 months –100% accuracy after 2 hours to 57% after 4 months. Exposure to New Information: Loftus (1975); –Class disrupted by eight demonstrators, –Immediately after, a)“Was t...