Law and Human Behavior最新文献

Law and Human Behavior's inaugural issue of 2025 begins with the publication of an official Scientific Review Paper (SRP) of the American Psychology-Law Society (AP-LS; Division 41 of the American Psychological Association). The article, "Police-Induced Confessions, 2.0: Risk Factors and Recommendations" (Kassin et al., 2025), was approved by a unanimous vote of the eligible AP-LS Executive Committee members in November 2024, and it represents the fourth such SRP that AP-LS has approved since it was founded in 1969-one on eyewitness identifications (Wells et al., 1998) and its update (Wells et al., 2020), and the initial SRP on police-induced confessions (Kassin et al., 2010). We are grateful to the authors of this exceptional piece, led by Saul Kassin, for bringing together decades of research, theory, and law to provide a nuanced understanding of this complex topic in an accessible manner for academics and practitioners around the world. In this brief Introduction, we, as the chair of the SRP Committee (Malloy) and the associate editor who handled the article for Law and Human Behavior (Perillo), describe the extensive efforts to develop, vet, and approve this article as an official SRP of AP-LS. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

We are grateful to prior Editorial Teams for being such outstanding stewards of Law and Human Behavior, and we are committed to maintaining the journal's high standards. We also appreciate the many contributions of the Editorial Board, ad hoc reviewers, Student Editorial Board reviewers, and participants in the Reviewer Mentoring Program for contributing their time and expertise to this journal. It takes the collective efforts of many people, including the American Psychology-Law Society Executive Committee and the publication staff at the American Psychological Association, for this journal to run efficiently and publish outstanding scholarship. We are excited to work on our initiatives, and we welcome any feedback or questions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Wrongful conviction databases have shed light on the fact that innocent people can be induced to confess to crimes they did not commit. Drawing on police practices, core principles of psychology, and forensic studies involving multiple methodologies, this article updates the original Scientific Review Paper (Kassin et al., 2010) on the causes, consequences, and remedies for police-induced false confessions. First, we describe the situational and personal risk factors that lead innocent people to confess and the collateral consequences that follow-including the corruptive effects of confession on other evidence, the increased likelihood of conviction at trial, the increased tendency to plead guilty despite innocence, the stigma that shadows false confessors even after exoneration, and the failure of Miranda to serve as a safeguard. Next, we propose the following remedies: (1) mandate the video recording of all suspect interviews and interrogations in their entirety and from a neutral camera angle; (2) require that police have an evidence-based suspicion as a predicate for commencing interrogation; (3) impose limits on confrontational interrogations, namely with regard to detention time, presentations of false evidence, and minimization themes that imply leniency; (4) adopt a science-based model of investigative interviewing; (5) protect youthful suspects and vulnerable adults by mandating the presence of defense attorneys during interrogation, and a suitable appropriate adult where required; (6) shield lay witnesses and forensic examiners from confessions to ensure the independence of their judgments; and (7) abolish contributory clauses from compensation statutes that penalize innocent persons who were induced to confess and/or plead guilty. These recommendations should help to prevent confession-based wrongful convictions and improve the administration of justice for all concerned. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 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) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Objective: Identification and implementation of effective methods for reducing racial/ethnic bias and disparities in legal settings are paramount in the United States and other countries. One procedure originally thought to reduce bias in legal decisions is the use of risk assessment instruments, which is now being heavily scrutinized. Measurement invariance, a latent trait technique, is a robust method for assessing one form of bias. Measurement invariance involves determining whether risk items in an instrument appear to be functioning the same between racial or other groups. Thus, the present study examined measurement invariance of the Structured Assessment of Violence Risk in Youth (SAVRY) between non-Latino Black and White youths to examine racial bias.

Hypotheses: We expected the SAVRY to be invariant (lacking measurement bias) between Black and White youths.

Method: The sample included 687 Black and 361 White youths, and the study used a large, multistate data set of SAVRYs conducted by probation officers. We conducted measurement invariance testing in a series of hierarchical steps including testing configural and scalar invariance.

Results: The SAVRY demonstrated scalar invariance (equal thresholds for ratings from "low" to "moderate" and "moderate" to "high") for all items except one-community disorganization.

Conclusions: The findings lend further credibility to the SAVRY, and the structured professional judgment approach, as a method to assess violence risk and case planning needs among youths involved in the legal system. These findings provide more confidence that significant differences in SAVRY risk level or items between Black and White youths are not based in measurement bias, with the exception of the community disorganization item. Potential fixes discussed include eliminating or deemphasizing this item in final risk level ratings. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Objective: The purpose of this study was to estimate the behavioral impacts of training police officers in implicit bias awareness and management.

Hypotheses: Training police in implicit bias reduces racial and ethnic disparities in stops, arrests, summonses, frisks, searches, and/or use of force.

Method: A cluster randomized controlled trial using the stepped wedge design was applied to 14,471 officers in the New York City Police Department, with a 1-day training delivered to clusters of police commands between May 2018 and April 2019 and outcomes measured with police records of individual events from April 2018 to May 2019. Police records were supplemented with survey data on 1,973 officers matched to administrative data. For each type of enforcement action, the likelihood that the action involved or was taken against Black or Hispanic suspects, respectively, relative to White suspects was estimated, controlling for potential confounders. Additional analysis allowed for estimating training effects of different magnitudes for Black, Hispanic, and White officers and for officers with greater motivation to act without prejudice or greater concern about discrimination.

Results: None of the estimated training effects achieved statistical significance at the .05 level.

Conclusions: Isolated and weak evidence of behavioral impacts of the training was detected. Several explanations for the null findings are considered. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 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) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).