PSYCH 280 1nd Edition Lecture 13 Outline of Last Lecture I. Gender Differencesa. Aggressionb. Empathy and Interconnectednessc. Sexual Attitudes and BehaviorII. Sexual Attitudes and behaviora. Sexual Promiscuityb. Mate Selectionc. JealouslyIII. Reasons for Gender DifferencesOutline of Current Lecture I. Social Psychology and the Lawa. Availability biasb. Behavior Deviationsc. Representativeness Base-Rate NeglectII. Base-Rate Neglect: PolygraphIII. Movie: Eyewitness TestimoniesCurrent LectureI. Social Psychology and The LawWe can apply things we’ve already learned in social psychology to the law and legal system.a. Availability Bias: Remember, people are out of touch with the actual frequencies and probabilities of events/occurrences/etc. Therefore, people are afraid of crime—our society fears crime, even though crime rates are lower than they were a fear years ago. This fear of crime drives policy makers to make new laws that, in our society, focus on punishing the criminal for their personality (instead of focusing on the situational factors surrounding their behavior).b. Behavior Deviations: Often, people’s normal behavior does not agree with “logical, rational” behavior. So, when people who are behaving normally don’t follow the “logical” rules of behavior, they seem suspicious. For example, look at the bystander effect. The more people witnessing a crime, the less likely it is for These notes represent a detailed interpretation of the professor’s lecture. GradeBuddy is best used as a supplement to your own notes, not as a substitute.any one individual to respond and help the victim. This doesn’t make the witnesses “bad,” they are behaving normally.c. Representativeness and Base-Rate Neglect: Base-rate neglect, or the tendency for people to misjudge the probability of a specific situation occurring by not taking into account all of the relevant information surrounding the situation, is a result of people over-relying on the representative heuristic (mental shortcut where we describe the likelihood of something based on the existing stereotypes/prototypes of that “something”).Basically, the different biases that we have impact our legal system and the law.II. Base-Rate Neglect: PolygraphWe can look at base-rate neglect in more detail by examining the “lie-detecting” machine calleda polygraph. Under good conditions, a polygraph achieves about 90% accuracy. This means that 90% of guilty people fail the test and 90% of innocent people pass the test (therefore, 10% of guilty people pass the test and 10% of innocent people fail the test). This does NOT mean, however, that if a person fails the test, there is a 90% chance they are guilty. In order to determine the chance that they are guilty, we have to look at the base rate information (other information surrounding the situation).a. A polygraph test should only be used when there is at least a 50/50 chance already that the person being tested is guilty.III. Movie: Eyewitness TestimoniesEyewitness testimonies are valued in a court of law—the eyewitness saw the crime, right? So their testimony should be heavily relied on, right? No—not exactly. Memory is a funny thing. Human memory can be tampered with and can be changed through suggestion. Memory is not a video camera!a. More confidence doesn’t necessarily mean the jury should trust the eyewitness’s testimony. Confidence can be determined and affected by other factors.b. Eyewitnesses who pick someone out of a photo line-up in less than 15 seconds should be “trusted” more than those that take a long time to study the pictures.a. Recognition memory is fast and if someone takes more than 15 seconds to “remember” the face, that can indicate that there is something else influencing their decision (other than recognition memory).c. Eyewitnesses need to be told that “the perpetrator may or may not be in this line-up.” If an eyewitness thinks the perpetrator is in the line-up (even if he/she is not), they will choose the person that most resembles the
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