Deception... is hard to study.

Sporer, S., & Schwandt, B. (2007). Moderators of nonverbal indicators of deception: A meta-analytic synthesis. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 13 (1), 1-34 DOI: 10.1037/1076-8971.13.1.1

Caution: this is another post where I deviate a little from what's been covered in class. Make sure you can differentiate what you learn from the book from what you read here before you continue, because you're not going to be tested on this stuff. I'm just presenting it as a different viewpoint from which to consider these kinds of psychological issues. That said, caveat emptor and continue on.

Dr. Geiselman has talked about the Behavioral Assessment Interview in class, which seeks to provide interrogators with nonverbal cues for investigators to look for to figure out when someone is lying to them: averted gaze, body turned, legs or arms crossed. However, he also acknowledged that this isn't always diagnostic or predictive of deception. The interogatee could just be nervous, for instance. And even beyond this, the hit rate for this technique is not all that great.

The plain truth is that it's really hard, maybe impossible, to detect deception just looking at nonverbal cues. This is what Siegfried Sporer and Barbara Schwandt (of the Justus-Liebig-University of Giessen in Germany) found out. They conducted a meta-analysis on the research that has been done on deception and failed to find any consistent nonverbal indicators.

For those of you who don't know, a meta-analysis is an analysis looking at the results of published studies on a given topic - it takes all the data that has been collected on a question and aggregates it, looking for trends and consistencies. These are generally good ways to find the effect size of a given construct, even though they're susceptible to the so-called "file drawer" problem: many studies are done but never published, due to the investigator finding something that doesn't agree with his or her hypothesis, or finding no result at all. These have to be left out of meta-analyses, resulting in an over-reporting of a given phenomenon.

However, given these limitations, it's remarkable that the authors of this analysis were unable to find any gestures that consistently betray deception. In fact, what they did find was that deceivers show less nodding and foot movement than truth-tellers; people move more when they tell the truth than when they lie. The most troubling finding comes when they compare their results with the opinions of average joes and professionals: everyone predicts that liars will do things like avert their gaze, shift in their seats, and gesticulate, and these expectations are quite strong. Unfortunately, they're entirely unfounded.

Gangs and Crime - or is it Crime and Gangs?

Tita, G., & Ridgeway, G. (2007). The Impact of Gang Formation on Local Patterns of Crime Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 44 (2), 208-237 DOI: 10.1177/0022427806298356

Before we head away from gangs completely, I wanted to bring up this paper looking at the connection between gangs and crime. Obviously, most gangs are heavily associated with crime in the areas in which they operate. The 10% of youth who join gangs are responsible for 80-90% of the crime that occurs in a given community. So which comes first? Basically, there are three theories for how the two are related:

• social facilitation - once a large group of juveniles congregate, they become more likely to commit crimes, and it is easier for them to do so (more lookouts, getaways, etc.).
  
• selection - the juveniles who are already committing crimes are likely to band together out of common interests, or for utilitarian reasons.
• enhancement - this combines facilitation and selection. Essentially, once the juveniles who are already committing crimes band together, they become much more effective and efficient.

The social facilitation and enhancement theories both predict that crime rates will go up after the establishment of a gang, while selection theory predicts that it will be relatively stable. Furthermore, facilitation can be separated from enhancement in that facilitation predicts there will be more people committing the crimes, whereas enhancement predicts that the same people will just be committing more crimes.

To test which one of these theories holds, the authors went to a site of emerging gang activity: Pittsburgh, PA. In addition, they wanted to test the theory that gangs inhibit certain types of crime, like property violence against local shopkeepers. (Personally, this sounds more like Organized Crime and "protection" to me, though I know gangs in LA run similar rackets with the local street vendors.) The investigators were able to draw causal conclusions from their dataset because prior to 1992, there was no gang activity in Pittsburgh. Looking at the two years before this time (90-91), the two years during "establishment" (92-93), and the two years postgang (94-95) it's possible to discern trends in crime rates that correspond with the introduction and maintenance of gang activity.

The authors obtain their crime data from 911 call records (problematic, yes, but they attempt to address these fears in the paper). They also try to disaggregate their data by defining, with the help of locals, what constitutes gang turf, and denoting areas as "carriers" of gang activity, or "set spaces," neighboring areas adjacent to gang turf, and non-neighbors. Comparisons of different types of crimes in these different areas is shown in Figure 2, and in Figure 3 they weight the crime rates to eliminate confounding factors, like racial makeup, income level, etc. There's an assumption that crime rates in non-neighboring areas are generally unaffected by gang activity, so comparing rates in these two areas can give an estimation of the effects of gangs on crime.

Looking at Figure 3, it's clear that after gangs gained a foothold in the 92-93 time period there were spikes in reportings of drug crimes, robberies, and shots fired in gang neighborhoods. All of these tapered off in the 94-95 period, returning to pre-gang levels or below. Looking at assaults and burglaries, there was no difference between gang and non-adjacent neighborhoods, and they both showed general downward trends over time, apparently unaffected by the introduction of gangs.

So what conclusions can be drawn from this data? It would appear that gangs aren't involved in assaults or burglaries, though they also don't result in the protective effects that were hypothesized. Drug crimes, robberies, and gunshots all increased, but only briefly. What could be causing this? Is it a need for the gang to establish itself as a force in the community with a concentrated burst of crime? Or is it a result of increased police focus and refinement of tactics having a real effect on crime? Alternately, it could possibly just be citizen fatigue, with residents getting tired of constantly calling 911, or having little to show for it when they do. Other possibilities are that residents are being threatened, or that they may actually benefit from the increased economic activity of the drug trade. Ultimately, it looks like the selection theory is not supported, and that gang activity actually results in new crimes and criminals, and doesn't just round up the old ones.

A Little Clarification on Psychopathy

HARE, R. (2006). Psychopathy: A Clinical and Forensic Overview Psychiatric Clinics of North America, 29 (3), 709-724 DOI: 10.1016/j.psc.2006.04.007

Guay, J., Ruscio, J., Knight, R., & Hare, R. (2007). A taxometric analysis of the latent structure of psychopathy: Evidence for dimensionality. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 116 (4), 701-716 DOI: 10.1037/0021-843X.116.4.701

So there's some confusion about the differences between the diagnoses of psychopathy and Antisocial Personality Disorder (APD). Well, to make matters worse, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) goes and equates the two. Dr. Geiselman has said in his lectures that the difference, in his experience, is that psychopathy is characterized by delusions, hallucinations, and other sensory phenomena. Okay, for the test you're going to want to go with this definition; however, I tend to prefer the definition offered by one of the primary researchers on psychopathy, Robert Hare. Did I ever mention how much great forensic research comes out of Canada? Hare's based in the University of British Columbia, and he developed the Psychopathy Checklist thirty years ago, which has become the instrument to assess psychopathy.

As summed up in a recent overview (Hare 2006), psychopathy can be subdivided into four main factors:

1. interpersonal (glibness, narcissism, conning behaviors, etc.)
2. affective (lack of remorse, shallow affect, etc.)
3. lifestyle (need for stimulation, parasitism, impulsivity, etc.)
4. antisocial (criminal versatility, poor control, etc.)

Notice there's no mention of hallucinations or disordered thinking among these factors. So how does this compare with APD? According to the DSM, they're synonymous. However, taking a real look at them, APD is diagnosed entirely by manifest behaviors, while psychopathy is an attempt to define a personality type by the underlying cognitive and relational patterns. As Lykken (quoted in Hare 2006) puts it: "Identifying someone as ‘having’ APD is about as nonspecific and scientifically unhelpful as diagnosing a sick patient as having a fever or an infectious or a neurological disorder." APD is the symptom; psychopathy is the disease. There's significant overlap in diagnoses of APD and psychopathy, but there are also significant numbers of people who fail to meet both definitions.

There have been numerous attempts to put psychopaths into a taxon, a group used for classification - either you're psychopathic or you're not. However, these attempts have consistently failed to find evidence supportive of a taxonomic system. Hare (2007), in a large and diverse sample, again tried to perform a taxometric analysis, but could only find evidence for dimensionality. What does this mean? Well, there are several reasons why a legitimate taxon could be covered up in an analysis, but if psychopathy is truly dimensional, it means that there are no clear, defining lines between those with psychopathy and those without. It may just be a scale on which a given person is either high, moderate, or low.

Article #6 - Blanchard et al. and Measuring Pedophilia

Blanchard, R., Kuban, M., Blak, T., Cantor, J., Klassen, P., & Dickey, R. (2006). Phallometric Comparison of Pedophilic Interest in Nonadmitting Sexual Offenders Against Stepdaughters, Biological Daughters, Other Biologically Related Girls, and Unrelated Girls Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment, 18 (1), 1-14 DOI: 10.1007/s11194-006-9000-9

So now we're delving into the mind of the pedophile. It's a disturbing, uncomfortable place to be, but it can also be quite fascinating and revealing of human nature in general. To me, at least, it's much more interesting to study the fixated, or "classical," pedophile, versus the opportunistic molester. They are generally much more deliberate and provide much more elaborate reasons for their behavior, which can be traced to the fact that they have a genuine attraction to children. While the opportunistic offender generally operates under a mixture of drugs, rage, and hormones, the fixated offender often truly appears to believe that they are doing something that should be okay, if only society loosened up.

Of course, there are differences among fixated pedophiles, as well. The paper for this week provides a good look at not only what these differences are, but also the techniques used to study this kind of behavior. The researchers got their subject pool from community and legal referrals for "illegal or disturbing sexual behavior" (except for the controls, who were referred by physicians), and they were grouped by their relation to the victim: biological fathers, stepfathers, nonpaternal incest, unrelated molesters, offenders against women, and the control group, who had no illegal activities but reported sexual complaints.

In order to gauge the degree of pedophilic orientation in each of these groups, the researchers employed a phallometric device - basically, a pressure gauge that fits over the penis. The subjects then heard descriptions of sexual acts with various subjects, male and female, ranging from prepubescents to adults, accompanied by slides. To get the "pedophilia factor approximation score" the results for the adult descriptions were subtracted from those of the prepubescent and pubescent descriptions.

As you can see in Fig. 1, there was a clear trend between relation to victim and pedophilic score. As the authors broke it down, the less of a social relation a perpetrator had to his victim, the more his pedophilic orientation. It appears that the more effort a person exerts to get to a victim, the more pedophilic he is likely to be. Interestingly, the biological fathers and stepfathers scored equivalently, while nonpaternal but related perpetrators scored on par with unrelated molesters. However, if you'll remember from class, stepfathers are more likely to offend than biological fathers (i.e. the percentage of stepfathers who are molesters is higher than the percentage of biological fathers who are molesters), which Dr. Geiselman attributed to some planning or manipulations by stepfathers who only marry for access to children. This would imply that stepfathers should display more of a pedophilic orientation, driving them to go through this effort to get what they want. But the results show that the ones who are more pedophilic are already related to the victim by chance!

There appears to be a complicated interaction between pre-existing motivation and access to victims that determines whether a person will offend or not. So are stepfathers scheming to get their hands on little kids, or are they slightly abnormal guys who just happen to end up in situations where their weaknesses are laid bare? Is there something special about raising an unrelated child that makes a stepfather more likely to offend? Many mammals rely on pheromone signaling to differentiate related and unrelated potential mates, i.e. those who are safe and those who might lead to genetic defects. It could be that similar systems operate in humans, and when a stepfather who would otherwise not display and pedophilic tendencies comes into regular, close contact with a young, unrelated child, this pheromonal system doesn't send the inhibitory signals that it would if the child were related.

Article #5 - Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment

Haney, C., & Zimbardo, P. (1998). The Past and Future of U.S. Prison Policy: Twenty-Five Years After the Stanford Prison Experiment American Psychologist, 53 (7), 709-727

As Neal Osherow mentioned in class, all the really groundbreaking research in social psychology was done 30-40 years ago, before people started realizing all the ethical implications of what they were doing. Thus, we ended up with things like the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE). If you're not familiar with it, then please check out Philip Zimbardo's slide show and website devoted to it. By setting up what at first glance would appear to be a simple study where undergrads were randomly assigned to be either "prisoners" or "guards," everyone involved, including the experimenters, ultimately got sucked into the situation and modified their behavior to fit stereotyped roles and beliefs of who deserved punishment and who was worthy to deliver it. The SPE has been criticized on many grounds (the Wikipedia page does a good job of summing up most of them) but it's still a clear example of just how situations can determine the boundaries and appropriateness of human behavior.

In their 1998 look back on the SPE, Haney and Zimbardo describe how information about imprisonment learned from psychology and the practice of institutionalization in the United States have diverged sharply since the 1970's. Many of these statistics and graphs should be familiar, as Dr. Geiselman has used them in his lectures, so you should know the basic story already: in the late 1970's the positivist school of criminology held sway and there was a push for rehabilitation and treatment of prisoners; however with the 80's came a shift to more conservative policies and a crime control emphasis - gang activity and crack grabbed media headlines and threw society into a panic. From then to our current situation the focus has been on locking more and more people up, to the point where now the majority of inmates in federal prisons are there on drug offenses for which they'll never receive treatment adequate to prevent recidivism.

Zimbardo and Haney point out that the setup of modern prisons is everything it shouldn't be: antagonistic guards lump all prisoners together, regardless of psychological, social, or cultural differences; judges, society, and prison administrators are intent on imposing "prison pain;" when/if a prisoner is released, they have little to no preparation for re-integration into society, and the longer they've been incarcerated the less successful they're likely to be on the outside. They relate these factors back to similar situations that developed in the brief days of the SPE, arguing that, even though inmate advocates have made some slight progress towards more humane treatment (with some disastrous setbacks), ultimately any change will have to come from the top down. Unfortunately, it seems that finding a person who is both far enough removed from actual prison environments to be able to avoid falling into a stereotyped role and in a position to effect actual change requires going all the way to the Supreme Court. The Reagan-era crime-&-punishment conservatism is currently still in ascendance, however, so no progress on prison reform is likely until the makeup of the court shifts to be more sympathetic.

Stepping away from prisons, it can be seen how the implications of the SPE would carry over to other situations. In an interrogation a person is detained by authority figures, often left in a state of uncertainty as to his fate or even why he's there, and may be treated alternately with sympathy or scorn. Interrogations are much, much shorter than the six days of the SPE, and the methods derived by some of the SPE guards would never be allowed in most precincts, but with a heavy confluence of stress factors similar results of compliance will be likely.

Article #4: Jury Deliberation

Gastil, J., Burkhalter, S., & Black, L. (2007). Do Juries Deliberate? A Study of Deliberation, Individual Difference, and Group Member Satisfaction at a Municipal Courthouse Small Group Research, 38 (3), 337-359 DOI: 10.1177/1046496407301967

I've been slacking a little on getting these posts out by Friday, but I'm getting back on track. This one is directly relevant to lecture, as it covers aspects that directly affect jury verdicts and the quality of those verdicts. In the taxonomy of jury studies, this is one that uses actual jury members, so there are some specific advantages and disadvantages on that basis alone. While the results can be assumed to be very valid and relatable to the real world, the experimenters couldn't control for specific variables or conditions. Since this was a survey-style study, their goal was to identify response trends that could be attributed to specific characteristics of the jurors. Of course, there are also strengths and weaknesses inherent in surveys (respondent truthfulness, self-selection, etc.) but we won't go into all of those right now.

The authors put forward several hypotheses to test. Specifically, they propose that jury members will be more likely to deliberate when they are motivated (1d) and have a positive view of the American jury system (1a), and when the jury is made up of more similar people (1b) with more political and educational experience (1c). Further, they're interested in whether it's better to have more juries be more homogeneous with regards to these variables, even if that means everyone's lower on them, and how deliberation affects satisfaction. This goes back to how Dr. Geiselman mentioned how judges generally try to be accommodating to jurors to encourage them to come back (though this doesn't exactly square with the exasperated and condescending behavior described in the book during trials; hopefully these are the exceptions).

One thing you might notice about the study: these are small juries. The mean was 6 jurors, but it says there were some with 5 or 7. I, for one, wasn't previously aware that jury size could deviate like this. But keep in mind that this sample doesn't use the standard 12-member jury. Do you think this might affect the ability to generalize the results? We already know that smaller juries are more likely to reach a verdict; certainly the quality of deliberation has some effect on that. Another thing to keep in mind while reading the results is the type of trials these juries tried:

Nearly a third (32.2%) of those participating in this study sat on juries hearing lowlevel assault charges, another 16.1% heard drunk-driving cases, and the rest heard a range of minor offenses from sexual indiscretion to reckless driving. The median juror spent 2 days in the courtroom, with 91% spending 3 or fewer days there. The median juror deliberated for no more than 1 hour, with 84% deliberating for 2 hours or less.

So these cases were relatively short, with most deliberations lasting less than 2 hours. This might mean that the results won't hold for longer deliberations.

But on to the results. Tables 2 & 3 clearly lay out the correlations between the variables, and the findings are quite striking. [Nota bene: in psychology, and social psychology in particular, a correlation of .25 is actually pretty big. It's notoriously difficult to isolate the specific factors that lead to these correlations, so finding these numbers in a survey study pretty strongly supports the conclusions. And when interpreting the findings, keep in mind that a correlation of .30 explains about 10% of the total variance. Still not very big, but significant.] Both political confidence and interest in the trial led to greater ratings of deliberations about the facts of the case and the freedom of expression in deliberation. Greater trust in the jury system was linked with jurors that treated each other more respectfully, and greater political partiality was correlated with more debate over the instructions. Absolute levels of political knowledge and education weren't correlated with anything, but the differences between jurors definitely had an effect: across the board, differences in political knowledge (and in political confidence) were associated with reduced deliberation; however, greater differences in education levels led to jurors rating respectful listening higher. Finally, when there were bigger differences in interest in the trial, jurors discussed the facts of the case more.

So what implications do these findings have? Well, it's clear that, in this sample, juror characteristics affected the quality of the deliberation, which in turn affected the satisfaction of the jurors. But from Table 1, it's clear that the ratings for all the aspects of deliberation were generally high across the board. So did these factors really affect any of the verdicts? And, as I mentioned before, can these results generalize to larger juries or more complex cases? Also, how well do these findings represent and relate to verdict juries - those who start the deliberation with a preliminary vote? The book suggests that there are definite differences between verdict juries and juries who wait until after deliberation to vote. Clearly, there's a lot of complicated issues arising from jury studies. Anyone inspired to get a subscription to Jurimetrics?

Article #3 - Testosterone and Recognizing Social Cues

van Honk, J., & Schutter, D. (2007). Testosterone Reduces Conscious Detection of Signals Serving Social Correction: Implications for Antisocial Behavior Psychological Science, 18 (8), 663-667 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01955.x

Hope everyone did well on the midterm and had a nice, relaxing weekend to recuperate. Here's a quick little article to ease you back into normality.

The authors of this study wanted to look at the effects of testosterone, so, in a clever bit of experimental control, they used an entirely female sample. Men's normal testosterone levels vary too much to extract any reliable information about their effects, but women have low enough levels to be able to control them entirely by injection. By doing just this and having the women rate faces displaying varying levels of emotion, they found that testosterone reduces our sensitivity to the emotions of fear and anger. This would have direct ramifications on a person's ability to use social learning: if a disapproving look is harder to discern, then it might be harder to learn not to kick your friends. The possibility, then, is that this determines a lifelong disadvantage, where a person continually falls further and further behind of his peers in social and moral development, possibly resulting in criminal behavior.

To tie these findings in to some developmental literature, researchers who study bullying in children and adolescents find that one common factor among many bullies is that they have trouble interpreting emotions. They'll see someone smiling and assume they're being mocked, for instance. Obviously, these two findings raise an obvious hypothesis: bullies are more likely to have high testosterone levels. The testosterone doesn't make them more aggressive, per se, but it does increase their exposure to situations where aggression seems to them to be a reasonable response.

In fact, there's very little to link aggression and testosterone by a direct causal mechanism. So it might then be asked (to bring it back to legal applications) what do these findings mean for defenses based on rage? You might recall that people have tried to get off on charges by claiming they were not responsible for their actions due to temporary chemical imbalances, such as the infamous "twinkie defense." A sudden surge in testosterone might impair a person's ability to reason and function socially, but is not likely to directly trigger aggression. How much control do people have over their own behavior, and how liable should they be over how they react to situations?

One more dilemma that might be added to the four in the textbook could be that between Biological Determinism and Free Will: psychology assumes that there are many chemicals, genes, developmental patterns, etc. that determine how we behave; in the legal system, however, it is assumed that people have the ability to determine and direct their behavior except for very rare circumstances (i.e. <1% of cases result in a successful NGRI verdict). Has the line between these two positions been drawn in the right place?