Previous studies have shown that mock jurors are skeptical of alibi witnesses who are related to or even have a close social relationship with a defendant. The present project tested respondents' ability to recall their whereabouts for a particular date and time. It also provided the first descriptive data on a variety of alibi topics. The majority of individuals claimed to have an alibi witness for a given time and the majority of alibi witnesses were friends or family members. Hispanic participants relied more heavily on family to serve in an alibi witness capacity whereas non-Hispanic Whites relied more heavily on friends.

No abstract

No abstract

Objective Undergraduate rape disclosure recipients and nonrecipients’ sociodemographic and life experience variables, attitudes towards rape and responses to a hypothetical rape disclosure were compared to determine differences between them. Participants One-hundred-ninety-two undergraduates at three universities participated in this online survey between November 2011 – April 2012. Methods Participants reported on their rape myth acceptance (RMA) and personal direct and indirect (i.e., disclosure receipt) experiences with sexual assault. Participants also responded to a hypothetical rape disclosure. Results Disclosure recipients were more likely to report a victimization history, and less confusion and perceived ineffectiveness in helping the hypothetical victim. RMA and nonrecipient status predicted perceived victim responsibility; these variables and childhood victimization predicted confusion about helping. RMA also predicted perceived ineffectiveness of one’s helping behaviors. Victimization history and female gender predicted victim empathy. Conclusions These findings can inform sexual assault-related programming for undergraduates through the provision of targeted assistance and corrective information.

Employing the federal Hate Crimes Prevention Act (HCPA) of 2009 and other such legislation as a backdrop, the present study evaluated the nature of beliefs about hate-crime legislation, offenders, and victims. In addition, it investigated construct validity (i.e., political beliefs and prejudice) and predictive validity (i.e., blame attribution and sentencing recommendations). A total of 403 U.S. adults completed measures of prejudice and an initial pool of 50 items forming the proposed Hate Crime Beliefs Scale (HCBS). Participants were randomly assigned to read one of four hate-crime vignettes, which varied in regard to type of prejudice (racial-, sexual orientation-, transgender-, and religion-based prejudices) and then responded to blame and sentencing questions. Factor analyses of the HCBS resulted in four sub-scales: Negative Views (i.e., higher scores reflect negative views of legislation and minority group protection), Offender Punishment (i.e., higher scores suggest endorsement of greater punishment), Deterrence (i.e., greater scores denote support for hate-crime legislation as a deterrent of more violence), and Victim Harm (i.e., higher scores reflect pro-victim attitudes). Greater pro-legislation and pro-victim beliefs were related to liberal political beliefs and less prejudicial attitudes, with some exceptions. Controlling for a number of demographic, situational, and attitudinal covariates, the Negative Views sub-scale displayed predictive utility, such that more negative views of legislation/minority group protection were associated with elevated victim blame, as well as lower perpetrator blame and sentencing recommendations. Results are discussed in the context of hate-crime research and policy, with additional implications considered for trial strategy, modern prejudice, and blame attribution theory.

Recent state and federal legislation such as the Hate Crimes Prevention Act (HCPA) addresses hate crime prevention and punishment. Two pivotal questions that arise in the development of such legislation are (a) should hate crime perpetrators be subject to penalty enhancements? and (b) should protections be extended to sexual and transgender minority individuals? This article presents two studies addressing these questions employing a two-step vignette methodology. Jury-eligible community members provided sentencing and blame attribution ratings for one of three hate crime scenarios (i.e., anti-African American, antigay, or antitransgender), as well as penalty enhancement agreement (i.e., yes/no) and measures of need for affect (Study 1) and need for cognition (Study 2). Patterns of findings across studies suggest that participants comply with hate crime legislation instructions in general, but sentencing decisions are consistently moderated by whether a participant agrees with the penalty enhancement aspect of hate crime legislation. Moreover, need for affect and need for cognition differentially impact perceptions of hate crimes; need for affect demonstrated predictive associations with victim blame, whereas need for cognition moderated relations with perpetrator sentence and blame judgments. Results are discussed with emphasis on the state of federal hate crime legislation, antigay and antitransgender prejudice, and future directions in research and policy.

The goals of the present study were to examine how context impacts perceptions of children, and the extent to which context interacts with a child's age and gender to alter adults perceptions of children. Specifically, we examine how perceptions of honesty (i.e. knowing the difference between truth and lie, being trusted by adults, being reliable, and honest) and cognitive ability (i.e. having a good memory for events and being able to attend and concentrate) are the same or different in the context of a child sexual abuse case (CSA) than when no context is provided. First, the results revealed few significant findings with regard to either juror or child gender. The analyses did reveal several context effects, with attention, trusted, reliable and honesty each producing higher ratings, and therefore better perceived memories, in the CSA condition than the no context condition. Also, ratings of all the dependent variables varied by age and 4 out of the 5 higher order interactions involved child age. Importantly, we found that ratings of honesty and cognitive abilities were not linear with age but, typically, ratings increased with age but then leveled out or started decreasing after 8 years-of-age.

Trying to remember something now typically improves your ability to remember it later. However, after watching a video of a simulated bank robbery, participants who verbally described the robber were 25% worse at identifying the robber in a lineup than were participants who instead listed U.S. states and capitals-this has been termed the "verbal overshadowing" effect (Schooler & Engstler-Schooler, 1990). More recent studies suggested that this effect might be substantially smaller than first reported. Given uncertainty about the effect size, the influence of this finding in the memory literature, and its practical importance for police procedures, we conducted two collections of preregistered direct replications (RRR1 and RRR2) that differed only in the order of the description task and a filler task. In RRR1, when the description task immediately followed the robbery, participants who provided a description were 4% less likely to select the robber than were those in the control condition. In RRR2, when the description was delayed by 20 min, they were 16% less likely to select the robber. These findings reveal a robust verbal overshadowing effect that is strongly influenced by the relative timing of the tasks. The discussion considers further implications of these replications for our understanding of verbal overshadowing.