Law and Human Behavior最新文献

Objective: One concern about the use of risk assessment instruments in legal decisions is the potential for disparate impact by race or ethnicity. This means that one racial or ethnic group will experience harsher legal outcomes than another because of higher or biased risk estimates. We conducted a systematic review of the literature to synthesize research examining the real-world impact of juvenile and adult risk instruments on racial/ethnic disparities in legal decision making.

Hypotheses: Given the nature of research synthesis, we did not test formal hypotheses.

Method: Our systematic literature search as of July 2023 identified 21 articles that investigated the disparate impact of 13 risk assessment instruments on various legal outcomes. Most of these instruments were actuarial pretrial screening instruments.

Results: Our narrative synthesis indicated that there is not strong evidence of risk instruments contributing to greater system disparity. Ten articles indicated that adopting risk instruments did not create (or exacerbate preexisting) disparities, and eight articles found that instrument use reduced disparities in legal decision making. Three articles reported evidence of disparate impact of risk instruments; only one of these studies received a strong study quality assessment score. We observed a scarcity of high-quality articles that employed what we deem to be the gold standard approach for examining the disparate impact of risk instruments (i.e., pretest-posttest design).

Conclusions: The evidence signals that risk instruments can contribute to reductions in disparities across multiple stages of legal decision making. Yet study quality remains low, and most research has been conducted on decisions during the pretrial stage. More rigorous research on disparate impact across diverse legal decision points and approaches to risk assessment is needed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Objective: Existing literature has yet to conceptualize and consolidate research on psychological essentialism and its relation to the criminal legal system, particularly in terms of explaining how individuals with justice involvement have been and could be differentially impacted across contexts. This article explores essentialism in the criminal legal system, including its potential consequences for inequity.

Method: We review research on essentialism as a psychological construct, its common applications to different social categorizations, and its trickle-down effects within the criminal legal system.

Results: Empirical work suggests that biases stemming from essentialism have the potential to severely affect individuals within the criminal legal system. Beyond assigning immutable properties across social groups, essentialism can give rise to biased attributions of responsibility and blame and affect decisions and behavior within three core domains of the criminal legal system: jury decision making, sentencing decisions, and public support for punitive policies.

Conclusions: We propose future policy recommendations to mitigate the adverse effects of essentialism in the criminal legal system, focusing especially on how using and adopting person-first language (focusing on people before characteristics) across society and policy can help to combat bias across criminal legal domains. Future research is needed on how to best address the adverse effects of essentialism and its biasing effects in the criminal legal system, as well as to examine the effects of essentialism in different legal contexts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Objective: Researcher-based degrees of freedom have been shown to contribute to low replication rates in science. That is, researchers' options within the process of designing and conducting empirical tests may increase the probability of false positive findings. The aim of this study was to transfer the concept of degrees of freedom to the practice of forensic-psychological assessment as it may likewise pose a severe threat to the reliability and validity of forensic assessments. Using an example from statement validity assessment, we identified degrees of freedom, calculated the different possible workflows that forensic experts can take, and elaborated on their consequences for the reliability and validity of their assessments. Importantly, we elaborated on why degrees of freedom likely not only increase noise in the results but also foster the occurrence of systematic biases in forensic practice.

Conclusion: Degrees of freedom in forensic-psychological assessments exist and lead to an enormous number of different possible workflows. As this threatens the interrater reliability and validity of forensic assessments and may lead to biases, we call for research on this issue and put forward recommendations for forensic practice. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Objective: Across two experiments, we examined three cognitive biases (order effects, context effects, confirmatory bias) in licensed psychologists' diagnostic reasoning.

Hypotheses: Our main prediction was that psychologist-participants would seek confirming versus disconfirming information after forming an initial diagnostic hypothesis, even given multiple opportunities to seek new information in the same case. We also expected that individual differences would affect diagnostic reasoning, such that psychologists with lower (vs. higher) cognitive reflection tendencies and larger (vs. smaller) bias blind spots would be more likely to demonstrate confirmatory bias.

Method: In Study 1, we recruited 149 licensed psychologists (M = 18 years of experience; 44% women; 71% White) and exposed them to one of four randomly assigned vignettes that varied order effects (one set of symptoms in reversed orders) and context effects (court referral vs. employer referral). They rank ordered a list of four possible initial diagnostic hypotheses and received a piped follow-up choice of which of two pieces of information (confirmatory or disconfirmatory) they wanted to test their initial hypothesis. Study 2 (n = 131; M = 21 years of experience; 53% men; 68% White) replicated and extended Study 1, following the same procedure except offering three sequential choice opportunities.

Results: Both studies found robust confirmatory information seeking: 92% sought confirmatory information in Study 1, and confirmation persisted across three opportunities in Study 2 (90%, 84%, 77%), although it lowered with each opportunity (generalized logistic mixed regression model), F(2, 378) = 3.85, p = .02, η_p² = .02.

Conclusion: These findings expand a growing body of research on bias in expert judgment. Specifically, psychologists may engage in robust confirmation bias in the process of forming diagnoses. Although further research is needed on bias and its impact on accuracy, psychologists may need to take steps to reduce confirmatory reasoning processes, such as documenting evidence for and against each decision element. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Objective: Racial biases exist in almost every aspect of the criminal legal system, resulting in disparities across all stages of legal procedures-before, during, and after a legal procedure. Building on expected utility theory, we propose an expected utility framework to organize and quantify racial disparities in legal procedures.

Hypotheses: Corresponding to the parameteres involved in estimating expected utility, we hypothesized that racial biases would occur at different stages of legal procedures.

Method: Using police interrogation procedures as an example, we obtained estimates from previous literature and demonstrated that racial disparities exist at each stage of legal procedures. We then used these estimates to compute and visualize expected utilities, which quantify the average long-term outcomes of interrogations for minority versus nonminority suspects.

Results: Based on this hypothetical example, the expected utility analysis suggests that biases at various stages of interrogations could potentially lead to substantial disparities in legal outcomes between racial groups. In particular, the example shows that interrogations might yield notably worse outcomes for minority suspects than nonminority suspects because of cumulative biases that occur before, during, and after this legal procedure.

Conclusions: The proposed expected utility approach not only offers a valuable tool for accounting the joint impacts of multiple stages of legal procedures to quantify racial disparities but also carries important implications for how the criminal legal system could reduce such disparities. That is, the criminal legal system must seek to reduce racial biases across all stages of legal procedures rather than focusing on just one aspect. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Objective: When an officer places a suspect in an identification procedure and the witness identifies the suspect, it falls on attorneys to make decisions that reflect the strength of that identification. The factor that most affects the strength of identification evidence is the likelihood that the suspect is guilty before being subjected to the procedure, which scholars refer to as the prior probability of guilt. Given large racial disparities in exonerations based on eyewitness misidentifications, the current work examined whether defense attorneys are less sensitive to prior evidence of guilt when the defendant is Black as opposed to White.

Hypotheses: We predicted that when the defendant's race was described as White rather than Black, attorneys' judgments would be more sensitive to variations in the evidence that would influence the base rate of guilt. We also predicted that attorneys would rate the case as stronger when the victim's race was described as White rather than Black.

Method: We gave 316 defense attorneys case files (modeled after the New York Police Department's style) that varied the strength of the preidentification evidence (strong vs. weak), the race of the defendant (Black vs. White), and the race of the victim (Black vs. White).

Results: Attorneys made judgments that were sensitive to the base rate of guilt, but self-report measures demonstrated that they did not understand the extent to which the base rate of guilt influences the reliability of eyewitness evidence. Participants also rated the strength of the preidentification evidence as stronger for Black than for White defendants.

Conclusions: Although attorneys are intuitively sensitive to the strength of preidentification evidence, they lack conscious awareness of how a suspect's prior probability of guilt affects likelihood of a mistaken identification, which may have implications for their ability to make race-neutral evaluations of preidentification evidence. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Objective: People who have been wrongly incarcerated report exceptionally poor mental health, and despite having been exonerated, they face discrimination similar to other formerly incarcerated people when seeking housing and employment opportunities. The current audit study was designed to test whether exonerees likewise face discrimination when seeking mental health treatment.

Hypotheses: Therapists will reply less often to treatment inquiries from exonerees and parolees compared to another prospective client with the same symptoms and trauma history-and when therapists do reply, they will less often be willing to meet with exonerated or paroled help seekers.

Method: We emailed 752 therapists across the United States while posing as a man seeking therapy for the mental health symptoms most commonly reported by exonerees. By random assignment, this help seeker had been either incarcerated and paroled, wrongly incarcerated and exonerated, or working as a first responder (control). For each email, we noted whether the therapist replied and, if so, the speed and length of the reply. We also content analyzed all replies for predetermined themes, including willingness to meet.

Results: Overall, therapists replied less often to exonerees (50.6%) than to first responders (62.9%) or parolees (61.1%), who did not differ (V = .11). Therapists' replies also differed in their willingness to meet (V = .13), such that inquiries from first responders would more often result in a meeting with a therapist (31.7%) compared with inquiries from exonerees (19.6%) or parolees (21.0%).

Conclusions: Exonerees' staggering rates of mental illness may be compounded by lesser treatment access. Therapists' reluctance to assist exonerees may reflect stigma and/or perceived incompetence. Our data highlight the need to destigmatize wrongful conviction, empower clinicians to treat exonerated clients, and advance legislation and other means to expand exonerees' access to mental health care. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Objective: Field research increasingly reveals that forensic evaluators are not interchangeable. Instead, they tend to differ in their patterns of forensic opinions, in ways that likely reflect something about themselves, not just the persons evaluated. This study used data from sexually violent predator (SVP) evaluations to examine whether evaluator differences in making intermediate decisions (e.g., instrument scoring, assigning diagnoses) might explain their different patterns of final opinions.

Hypotheses: Although this study was generally exploratory and not strongly hypothesis driven, we expected that there might be evidence for a simple form of bias in which some evaluators would be more likely than others to consistently "find" indications of SVP status (i.e., consistently assigning higher risk scores and more SVP-relevant diagnoses) and, therefore, be more likely to find behavioral abnormality, the legal construct qualifying someone for commitment as an SVP.

Method: The study used data from 745 SVP evaluations conducted by 10 different evaluators who were assigned cases from the same referral stream. Potential evaluator difference variables included behavioral abnormality opinions, paraphilia and antisocial personality disorder diagnoses, and Psychopathy Checklist-Revised and Static-99 scores.

Results: Evaluator differences explained a statistically significant (p < .001) amount of variance in behavioral abnormality opinions (17%), paraphilia diagnoses (7%), and Psychopathy Checklist-Revised scores (16%). Contrary to our expectation of a simple tendency for some evaluators to find all indicators of SVP status more often than others, evaluators differed in the ways that underlying diagnoses and scores corresponded with their conclusions. The overall pattern was one in which different evaluators appeared to base their final opinions on different factors.

Conclusions: Findings reveal further evidence of substantial forensic evaluator differences in patterns of assigning instrument scores and reaching forensic conclusions. But these findings are the first to also reveal wide variability in their patterns of reaching forensic conclusions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).