Improving Accuracy in Memory Recall: The Particular Case of Alibi Generation

Imagine you are standing trial for a crime you didn’t commit. The prosecutor asks, “Where were you at 9pm on the night of the murder?” The night feels like ages ago, and you aren’t entirely sure. Giving your best guess, you guess wrong.

In 1985, Ronald Cotton had to provide an alibi for the night of a crime. However, being confused, he provided the place he was the week before the crime. This memory error was largely to blame for Cotton’s sentence of life plus 50 years in prison. It wasn’t until ten years later that Cotton was exonerated based on DNA evidence.

What made Cotton confused about where he was? Was it just an unlucky day, or is this a mistake that people can commonly make? And would there be a way to fix these errors, or at least help people make fewer mistakes?

Unfortunately, until recently, not many scientific studies have directly examined this important problem. This was mainly because it was hard to establish the ground truth when asking where people were. However, now, almost everybody carries a tracking device that allows researchers to know precisely where they were at any given time: a smartphone.

Relying on this modern convenience, my colleagues and I designed a study where participants used a smartphone app to record their daily whereabouts. The app automatically and continuously recorded (every 10 minutes) the participant’s location and also their environment (such as the sound and their movements). This recording happened for 4 weeks.

A week after the recording period, participants were tested on the accuracy of their memory. We gave the participants a Google Map with 4 location pins, and asked which pin showed where they were at a certain day and time. One pin was the actual location, while the other pins were randomly selected from places they visited during the 4-week period. Each participant received 72 test questions, which asked a location for a different day and time.

Overall, people were accurate 64% of the time, which was above the accuracy level if they randomly guessed (25%, four options). However, the interesting part was in the errors that the participants made, as they showed certain patterns.

How Did People Mis-Remember?

We saw three common mistakes. When the participants picked a wrong location pin, it tended to be geographically closer to the correct pin. They also wrongly picked location pins that had a similar environment (such as sound, movement) to the correct pin. Lastly, the wrongly picked locations were visited at a similar time to the correct location.

This last type of memory error regarding time is especially interesting, as it was shown in two ways. First, participants wrongly picked locations that they visited right before or after visiting the correct location. For example, if the correct location was the grocery store, when people made an error, it tended to be the location before or after visiting the grocery store (maybe a  coffee shop).

Second, participants wrongly picked locations that they visited on the same day of week, or at the same time of day as the correct locations. For example, when making an error, some participants wrongly chose a location that they visited on the same day of the week as the correct location (e.g., Monday), even though it was a week before. Others chose a location that was visited at the same time as the correct location (e.g., 5pm), even though it was not on the same day. These examples illustrate a type of error regarding the so-called ‘categorical time’ —and this error is exactly the one Cotton made. Our study supports that this is a common error everyone makes!  These results together show that people are most confused when trying to remember events that happened in a similar location, time, and/or environment.

Is There A Way To Avoid These Memory Errors?

Avoiding these memory errors is essential when the outcome has a critical consequence. Is there a way to decrease, if not perfectly avoid, cases like Ronald Cotton’s?

The results of our study provide some hints.

First, investigators such as police interrogators should be fully aware of these natural memory errors that people make. Second, it will also help if questioners check for possible memory errors by asking specific questions. For example, if the person said he was at the bar last Monday at 5pm, the investigator can ask whether it was not the week before last, or whether it was not Tuesday or Friday at 5pm, to find out whether he has a pattern of visiting that bar that could confuse his memory. We believe that these ‘right questions’ can help people with more accurate recall, and—in the case of crimes—produce more accurate alibis.

Faulty memory isn’t always a huge deal, but as the case of Ronald Cotton shows, it can be the difference between freedom and imprisonment.


For Further Reading

Dennis, S. J., Garrett, P., Yim, H., Hamm, J., Osth, A. F., Sreekumar, V., & Stone, B. (2019). Privacy versus open science. Behavior Research Methods, 51, 1839–1848. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-019-01259-5

Laliberte, E., Yim, H., Stone, B., & Dennis, S. J. (2021). The fallacy of an airtight alibi: Understanding human memory for “where” using experience sampling. Psychological Science, 32(6), 944–951. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797620980752
 

Hyungwook Yim is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cognitive Sciences at Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea. His research focuses on human learning and memory, and their development using computational models. 

Simon Dennis is a Professor in the School of Psychological Sciences, and the Director of the Complex Human Data Hub at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He is also the CEO of Unforgettable Research Services Pty Ltd. His research utilizes large scale real world data, experimental paradigms and computational modelling techniques to investigate the cognitive architecture underlying memory and language. 

 

Why We Neglect Some Sexual Harassment Victims More than Others

In October 2017, the New York Times published Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s landmark investigation on Harvey Weinstein, and women began sharing their experiences of sexual assault and harassment on social media with two simple words: Me too. The #MeToo social media movement spurred a cultural reckoning about our understanding and treatment of sexual harassment and assault.

Nonetheless, many prominent activists, including the original founder of the movement Tarana Burke, have argued that the mainstream #MeToo movement has largely centered on and benefited only a small subset of women, such as those who were attractive, affluent, and White (e.g., Hollywood actresses). Meanwhile, many women, especially women of color and low-wage workers, are excluded from the movement and continue to encounter disbelief, dismissal, and obstacles to legal recourse.

Why have certain victims of harassment and assault received attention and support while others continue to face neglect? We theorized that people ‘miss’ sexual harassment unfolding in front of them, question whether the harassment actually occurred, and minimize the severity of harassment when it targets women who do not fit the prototype of a sexual harassment victim. If we asked people to imagine a victim of sexual harassment, we predicted that they would likely imagine a feminine, young, and attractive woman who reflects the prototype of women and ideas about how women in our society should look and behave. Accordingly, it would be easier for people to connect sexually harassing behaviors to prototypical women. In consequence, people might be more likely to detect harassing behavior, believe harassment claims, and think harassment is harmful when it targets more prototypical (for example more attractive, feminine) compared to less prototypical women. To test this theory, we conducted 11 studies, which we divided into three sets.

What is the Prototype of a Sexual Harassment Victim?

When people imagine a sexual harassment victim, what kind of woman are they picturing? In our first study, participants (students from the University of Washington) read about a woman who had either been groped by her supervisor or had only been accidentally harmed by her supervisor. We then gave participants a box of colored pencils and a piece of paper to draw the woman they had read about. As rated by independent coders, participants who read about a woman who experienced sexual harassment drew more prototypical and feminine women than did those who read about accidental harm. Using additional methods such as survey ratings and morphed photographs in our other studies with online and university participants, we consistently found that people perceived women who were sexually harassed to be prototypical women.

This bias in people’s minds about how victims would look is potentially dangerous because non-prototypical women are actually disproportionately vulnerable to sexual harassment, meaning the sexual harassment victim prototype does not reflect reality.

Does Prototypicality of Victims Influence Their Credibility?

We wanted to know if these flawed victim prototypes can bias people’s perceptions of harassment, so we next tested whether people ‘miss’ sexual harassment when it targets non-prototypical women compared to prototypical women. Vignettes describing some women as prototypical or non-prototypical through their traits and careers were used in some studies, and morphs of facial photographs that were made to look more masculine or more feminine were used in other studies. Participants then read that a more or less prototypical woman experienced a potentially ambiguous sexual harassment incident, such as a supervisor inquiring about her relationship status or physically touching her. These behaviors were more likely to be seen as sexual harassment when they targeted a prototypical woman as opposed to a non-prototypical woman, despite the fact that all women experienced the same exact incidents.

Finally, we examined whether the narrow victim prototype holds legal consequences for non-prototypical women who are sexually harassed. Under the current legal system in the United States, for a case to reach an investigative body, be taken seriously, and have a legal outcome that favors the victim, the harassment claim must be perceived as credible, and the harassing behavior must be perceived to have caused significant psychological harm to the victim. Consistent with our other findings, we found that people perceive non-prototypical women’s harassment claims to be less credible than those of prototypical women, and that people think non-prototypical women are less upset, distressed, or traumatized by harassment. Additionally, we found some evidence that people may assign less severe punishments to perpetrators who harass non-prototypical women.

It Adds Up to…

Because people so strongly associate sexual harassment victims with prototypical women, non-prototypical women may face greater barriers when seeking help or justice in the face of sexual harassment. The inappropriate and illegal behavior they encounter may go unrecognized, their reports may be doubted and dismissed, and their experiences may be downplayed as harmless and undeserving of punishment. Victim prototypes can bias people’s perceptions of harassment in ways that may contribute to discriminatory treatment under the law. Given that non-prototypical women are disproportionately vulnerable to sexual harassment and that the majority of women probably do not fit this narrow prototype of a conventionally young, attractive, and White image, it is especially concerning that a victim who does not fit this picture may not receive the civil rights protections afforded to her by federal law, much less the emotional support and workplace outcomes she may also need.

Understanding the biased perceptions people hold about victims of sexual harassment is critical to recognizing the barriers many victims face and ensuring that all women targeted by sexual harassment receive the same protection, support, and justice under the law.


For Further Reading

Berdahl, J. L. (2007). The sexual harassment of uppity women. Journal of Applied Psychology, 92(4), 425-437. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010 .92.2.425

Buchanan, N. T., Settles, I. H., & Woods, K. C. (2008). Comparing sexual harassment subtypes among black and white women by military rank: Double jeopardy, the jezebel, and the cult of true womanhood. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 32(4), 347-361. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-6402.2008.00450.x

Goh, J. X., Bandt-Law, B., Cheek, N. N., Sinclair, S., & Kaiser, C. R. (2021). Narrow prototypes and neglected victims: Understanding perceptions of sexual harassment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000260


Bryn Bandt-Law is a PhD student at the University of Washington and conducts research on intergroup perceptions and gender-based violence.

Nathan N. Cheek is a PhD candidate in psychology and social policy at Princeton University and studies inequality, prejudice, and decision-making.

Jin X. Goh is an assistant professor of psychology at Colby College where he teaches and conducts research on social identities and intergroup perceptions.

Cheryl R. Kaiser is Professor and Chair of Psychology at the University of Washington and conducts research on social identity, diversity, discrimination, and civil rights law.

Stacey Sinclair is Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs at Princeton University and studies prejudice, implicit bias, diversity, and inequality.

People Believe that Prison Transforms Prisoners for the Better

Criminals remain some of society’s most reviled individuals. Because they have broken the law, people often treat criminals as though they are unthinking brutes or unfeeling machines—in other words, as less than fully human. This dehumanization of criminals is commonplace. What we don’t know is how this dehumanization changes over the prison sentence. Do people dehumanize prisoners more as they spend more time in prison? Or do people dehumanize prisoners less as their release date approaches? Before we started our research, we thought either could be true.

People may dehumanize prisoners more the longer they stay in prison for several reasons. For instance, people may see these individuals as increasingly associated with prison—a place most do not think of fondly. They may be forever tainted by the stigma associated with incarceration. We may also see these individuals as more criminal given that they are surrounded by fellow prisoners and may be learning more ways to be criminal. Or, perhaps we see these individuals as worn down by their time behind bars. Prison is a difficult place to live, and the more time someone spends there, the more it will take a physical and mental toll.

Alternately, people might dehumanize prisons less as their release date approaches. When their sentence is up, prisoners are released back into society. It is no longer easy to simply ignore their existence—we have to think about them and their humanity. Moreover, by serving their time, we might think of prisoners as having “paid their price” or as having been sufficiently rehabilitated—points we return to below. Maybe people think that prisons improve prisoners.

Our experiments tested these questions. Does prisoner dehumanization change over the course of the prison sentence? We showed American participants pictures of actual prisoners alongside information about their sentences. All prisoners were serving a 4-year sentence, but some were described as having served only the first month of their sentence, whereas others had served all but the last month. We measured prisoner dehumanization by having participants rate the prisoners on how mentally and emotionally sophisticated they seemed—to what extent are they able to think? To feel? To enact self-control? In other words, did they have fully humanlike mental and emotional abilities? Our results showed that people reliably see prisoners as more emotionally and cognitively sophisticated when they are closer to their release date. In other words, people dehumanize soon-to-be-released prisoners less than those who have just started their sentence.

But why? To answer this, we turned to explanations for why we incarcerate criminals. Philosophers and criminal justice scholars advocate four primary functions of prisons. The first is rehabilitation, which is about reforming prisoners for successful reentry into society. Second is retribution, which is about punishing criminals to balance the scales of justice. Third is deterrence, which is about preventing future crimes from happening by threatening lawbreakers with punishment. Finally, the fourth is incapacitation, which is about removing criminals from society to prevent them from victimizing anyone else.

We tested each of these possibilities, asking people how much they believed the prisoners they viewed were rehabilitated, punished, deterred from future crimes, and isolated from society (thus preventing wrongdoing). Results revealed that our participants believe that prison changes people for the better—they thought prison rehabilitates prisoners and deters their future criminal behavior—which caused participants to humanize them more.

We think it makes sense that people who see prisoners as changed by their time in prison, either because they are rehabilitated or deterred from committing future crimes, see these prisoners as more emotionally and cognitively sophisticated. In other words, changes in beliefs about prisoner dehumanization over the course of a sentence can be partially explained by perceived changes in the prisoners themselves.

It’s important to stress that this research does not answer whether prisons are actually effective at rehabilitating or deterring prisoners. Instead, our findings indicate that people who perceive prisoners as having been rehabilitated or deterred may be less likely to dehumanize those prisoners. It’s also important to note that, so far, we have only used photos of White male prisoners and primarily White, and only American, participants, which limits our findings. Different nations have different incarceration policies, which may affect attitudes toward prisoners. The type of crime for which one was incarcerated may also be an important question in this dehumanization. Perhaps there are some types of crimes—such as crimes against children—that are seen as so abhorrent that rehabilitation seems impossible. Furthermore, racial stereotypes could change the results—for example, if White participants were judging Black prisoners.

Although there is much still to learn, our findings may help researchers who study dehumanization and criminology, and they also have practical implications as well: the more people see prison as rehabilitative or deterring, the more prisoners might be more accepted at the end of their incarceration.


For Further Reading

Deska, J. C., Almaraz, S. M., & Hugenberg, K. (2020). Dehumanizing prisoners: Remaining sentence duration predicts the ascription of mind to prisoners. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 46(11), 1614-1627. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167220911496

Vasiljevic, M., & Viki, G. T. (2014). Dehumanization, moral disengagement, and public attitudes to crime and punishment. In P. G. Bain, J. Vaes, & J.-P. Leyens (Eds.), Humanness and dehumanization (pp. 129–146). Psychology Press.


Jason C. Deska is an assistant professor of psychology at Ryerson University who studies how the impressions people form of others produce and sustain inequality.

Kurt Hugenberg is a professor of psychology at Indiana University Bloomington who studies stereotyping, prejudice, and intergroup bias.

What We Get Wrong About the Criminal Justice System

Human beings are exceptionally curious creatures. Beginning early in life, humans seek to understand why things happen by asking questions. Not only do humans ask “why” questions, they also readily communicate their personal theories about why things happen and why people behave like they do. In other words, people generate their own causal explanations.

People often generate explanations of other people’s behavior that highlight the internal characteristics of the person rather than external factors that might have caused them to behave as they did. For example, if asked to explain why a co-worker was late for work, people will probably refer to their co-worker’s internal characteristics, such as his or her  inherent laziness or tardiness, as opposed to mentioning external factors beyond his or her control, such as the fact that his bus was late. Larisa Heiphetz and I built on this idea by asking people to explain why others might come in contact with the criminal justice system.

An enormous amount of data suggests that external factors—such as racism, poverty, and other forms of inequality—play a critical role in incarceration within the United States. In support of this point, consider that, in the United States, Black people make up approximately 13% of the population but 40% of the people who are incarcerated. Moreover, chew over the finding that people who are incarcerated had a median income of $19,185 prior to incarceration—a figure that is approximately 40% less than non-incarcerated people of a similar age. And this finding applies to people regardless of their gender, race, or ethnicity. Given that societal inequality and contact with the justice system are so deeply intertwined, we thought that people might be likely to generate externally-focused, societal explanations for incarceration, even though that’s not what people normally do.

We tested this possibility by studying two groups of research participants—a group of 6- to 8-year-olds and a group of adults, all living in the United States. We told participants about an individual who was in jail or prison and asked how much they agreed with different explanations for his incarceration. Two of the explanations referred to causes that involved the person himself—that the person was incarcerated because “he is a bad person” or because “he did something wrong.” Another explanation referred to an external, societal-level cause, namely that the person was incarcerated because “he didn’t have very much money when he was growing up.”

Participants underestimated the extent to which societal factors affect incarceration: they more readily endorsed and generated individual-level explanations that mentioned internal or behavioral factors than explanations that referenced societal factors. Specifically, both children and adults generated and endorsed behavioral explanations for incarceration. For example, participants often explained that people experience incarceration because they “have committed a crime.” However, children were more likely than adults to generate and agree with explanations highlighting internal reasons for incarceration, such as being a “bad” person.

Why would people generate and endorse individual-level explanations for incarceration when incarceration is so heavily influenced by societal factors? One potential answer is that understanding the role of societal factors in incarceration may depend, in part, on a type of social experience that most of our participants did not have—social relationships with people who have been directly impacted by the criminal justice system. We tested this possibility by examining whether one particularly relevant type of personal experience—namely, parental incarceration—might shape people’s inferences about why people come in contact with the justice system. 

We did this by asking children whose parents either were or were not incarcerated to explain why people break the law. Participants underestimated the extent to which societal factors underlie law-breaking, the behavior that is ostensibly most directly linked with incarceration. Children of incarcerated parents, like children whose parents were not incarcerated, readily mentioned internal factors (such as “because their heart is different”) and behavioral factors (such as “because they don’t do the stuff the police tells them to do”). But, as in our previous study, neither group of children readily mentioned societal factors. So, knowing someone who is incarcerated didn’t seem to affect how children explain why people break the law.

Although societal factors, including inequality, play a critical role in determining who has contact with the criminal justice system, our participants—regardless of age or their social relationships with incarcerated individuals—rarely used these types of attributions.  Instead, they attributed such contact to individual-level causes, such as people’s bad moral character. Scientific consensus does not currently exist about why people don’t “see” the inequality that drives punitive outcomes such as incarceration. One possibility is that cultural narratives in the United States tell us that we are responsible for our circumstances—consider the idiom, “You’ve made your bed, now lie in it.”

Viewing contact with the justice system as stemming from individual-level causes is consequential. People are more likely to help and feel empathic toward others whose misfortunes seem to be caused by external versus individual-level causes. Thus, by explaining contact with the justice system solely with individual-level factors, we’re not only getting it wrong. We’re getting it wrong, and we’re also setting ourselves up to feel negatively toward people who deserve acceptance and understanding.


For Further Reading

Dunlea, J. P., & Heiphetz, L. (in press). Children's and adults' understanding of punishment and the criminal justice system. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

Heiphetz, L. (2019). Moral essentialism and generosity among children and adults. Journal of        Experimental Psychology: General,148, 2077-2090. doi: 10.1037/xge0000587 [pdf]

Kraus, M. W., Rucker, J. M., & Richeson, J. A. (2017). Americans misperceive racial and economic equality. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences114, 10324-10331. doi:      10.1073/pnas.1707719114 [pdf]

James Dunlea is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Psychology at Columbia University. His research largely centers around understanding how children and adults reason about punishment. You can find him on Twitter @James__Dunlea or can reach out to him via e-mail ([email protected]).

How Do Dispositional Tendencies Shape How We Assign Blame?

Accidents happen, and when misfortunes occur we tend to look for someone or something to blame.

When such accidents lead to court cases, it often falls upon a jury to determine fault. How does an individual’s attributional tendency impact how they assign blame?

This is the question Ashley Votruba from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln sought to answer in her opening presentation titled The Influence of Social Attributions on Juror Perceptions, presented for the Social Psychology and Law: In the Courtroom and Beyond preconference at the SPSP Annual Convention. Votruba found that individuals’ dispositional tendencies influence their attributions of fault and blameworthiness.

Votruba’s research is based on the theoretical concept of social attributions. Individuals may hold more situational or dispositional tendencies when making attributions. Those with more situational tendencies are likely to rely on contextual factors such as social roles to form judgments. Alternatively, those with dispositional tendencies are more likely to rely on individual factors such as the person’s personality or history.

Across three studies, Votruba tested how social attributions impact jurors’ perceptions of responsibility in negligent tort cases. In one study, respondents examined a case in which a car accident took place. Respondents with higher dispositional tendencies were more likely to allocate higher rates of fault to the driver in the scenario, perceive the driver as being more blameworthy, and reported that higher damage amounts were owed. 

A medical malpractice case was used to assess similar concepts in study two. Once again, the findings suggested that those with higher dispositional tendencies were likely to assign more responsibility to the individual. These individuals were likely to agree that the doctor’s actions were inappropriate and that he failed to uphold the accepted standard of care. The findings of this study provide further evidence that attributional tendencies can influence jurors’ perceptions of blame. 

This line of research is important as it points to the possibility that jurors may rely on their existing attributional tendencies. It is not difficult to see why this may be problematic. We expect that jurors consider the evidence objectively but this research suggests that other factors may play a role.

It may seem that priming individuals to a more situational orientation could help to solve this challenge. However, Votruba’s study three suggests that doing so may prove to be difficult. The goal of this study was to use an experimental manipulation to determine if respondents could be made to be more situationally focused. The manipulation did not have a statistical impact. However, it is possible that alternative manipulations could lead to priming jurors to be more situationally focused.

Ultimately, several questions remain for future exploration, including whether manipulating attributional tendencies is possible. Further, how can these findings inform the legal system to help better guide juror decision-making? And finally, does the presentation of character evidence in a court case interact with dispositional tendencies to influence attributions of blame?


Written by Kristan Russell, PhD Student at the University of Nevada, Reno

Preconference: Social Psychology and Law: In the Courtroom and Beyond

Presentation: The Influence of Social Attributions on Juror Perceptions

Speaker: Ashley Votruba, JD, PhD - University of Nebraska - Lincoln

                                                               

 

Women in Poverty Experience More Gender-based Violence, but Get Less Help

Compared to higher-income women, women in poverty are more likely to experience domestic abuse and sexual harassment, and they are more severely affected by this violence—psychologically, physically, and financially. Yet, women in poverty are also more likely to encounter neglect and dismissal when they reach out to others during or after harassment and abuse. They get less support from those around them, whether at work, in their community, or when seeking help from professionals such as medical providers and police.

In our recent research, we set out to better understand why people seem to be less attentive to women in poverty when they are actually more in need of support when facing harassment and abuse.

Biased Beliefs About the "Toughening" Effects of Poverty

Research has shown that people sometimes believe individuals in poverty are less harmed by negative events than higher-income people. This belief echoes the well-known saying "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger"—people often think that going through difficult experiences, even the chronic adversity of poverty, "toughens" people. In essence, people in poverty are seen as having grown a metaphorical "thick skin" after hardship—leading researchers to label this belief "the thick skin bias."

We wondered if the biased belief that lower-income people are less harmed by negative events might apply to perceptions of gender-based violence, causing people to think that such violence is less distressing for lower-income women. To test this, participants from the U.S. read about either a low-income woman or a high-income woman. The low-income woman was described as coming from a family who often struggled "to have enough money for food, rent, or other basic things," while the high-income woman was described as having "not experienced any financial difficulties in her life."

We then asked participants to rate how distressing several instances of abuse and harassment would be for the woman they read about. For domestic abuse, we described instances of the woman's partner verbally abusing her, threatening her, or physically assaulting her. For sexual harassment, we described the woman's coworker making harassing sexual comments at work. Participants thought that both the abuse and the harassment would be less distressing for the low-income woman than the high-income woman. This bias emerged when participants judged White women and when they judged Black, East Asian, and Latina women.

Consequences of Biased Perceptions of Gender-based Violence

We then wanted to see whether this biased perception of violence as less distressing for lower-income women could explain the neglect of women in poverty. In one study, we asked participants how much a bystander needed to intervene to help a woman experiencing domestic abuse. Participants thought that lower levels of bystander intervention were necessary for a lower-income woman than for a higher-income woman, and this was predicted by perceptions that the abuse was less harmful for the lower-income woman.

In two other studies, we asked participants how much social support would be needed by a woman experiencing harassment and abuse. Participants thought less social support was necessary for a lower-income woman, and again this was predicted by perceptions that abuse and harassment were less harmful for the lower-income woman.

Together, our studies suggest that one reason why women in poverty who experience abuse and harassment are neglected more than higher-income women is that people mistakenly believe that they are less harmed by gender-based violence and are therefore less in need of bystander intervention and social support. And, concerningly, this belief doesn't have to come from negative feelings towards women in poverty—in fact, in our studies, participants rated lower-income women as warmer and friendlier than higher-income women. It's not that people aren't willing to help women in poverty. It's that people think helping is less necessary.

We suspect that biased beliefs about how harmed women in poverty are might explain some other patterns of neglect as well. For instance, low-income women have shared their experiences of feeling ignored by the Me Too movement, and one of the reasons for this neglect may be that sexual violence seemed like less of an urgent, harmful problem for "thicker-skinned" women in poverty. This bias might even have shaped U.S. law, where legal precedent requires a higher, more severe level of behavior in lower-wage workplaces to legally qualify as workplace harassment under Title VII of federal law because potentially harassing behaviors are believed to be less harmful in "blue collar" workplaces.

In sum, biased beliefs about "thick skin" may cause women in poverty to be neglected and dismissed when they experience abuse and harassment. And biased perceptions may be especially likely to cause neglect of women in poverty who hold additional marginalized identities. Society may need to find strategies to counteract this bias to ensure that all survivors of violence receive the support they need and the justice they deserve.


For Further Reading

Cheek, N. N., Bandt-Law, B., & Sinclair, S. (2023). People believe sexual harassment and domestic violence are less harmful for women in poverty. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 107. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2023.104472

Conner, D. H. (2013). Financial freedom: Women, money, and domestic abuse. William & Mary Journal of Women and the Law, 20, 339-397. https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmjowl/vol20/iss2/4

Fitzgerald, L. (2020). Unseen: The sexual harassment of low-income women in America. Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion, 39, 5–16. https://doi.org/10.1108/EDI-08-2019-0232


Nathan N. Cheek is Assistant Professor of Psychological Sciences at Purdue University and studies decision-making, prejudice, and inequality.

Bryn Bandt-Law is a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University and conducts research on intergroup perceptions and gender-based violence.

Stacey Sinclair is Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs at Princeton University and studies prejudice, implicit bias, diversity, and inequality.

Jury Diversity and Deliberations

When a jury reaches a controversial or unpopular verdict in a high-profile case, the public often wants to know more about that jury. Who are they? What is their demographic background?

In several recent high-profile cases, the composition of the jury has received significant media and public attention. When George Zimmerman—who killed Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black teenager wearing a hooded sweatshirt—was acquitted, many disagreed with the verdict and began to shift attention to the jurors and their identity. The jury in his case was composed of all women and contained only one person of color.

Many structural barriers to participation on juries result in juries that do not represent their communities—particularly in terms of race and ethnicity. For example, juries are recruited through voter registration records which underrepresent people of color. Even if the methods used to recruit juries were more representative of the community in which the trial takes place, jurors still need to survive the jury selection process. Called Voir Dire (Latin for "to speak the truth"), this process involves the judge and/or attorneys asking jurors questions to assess their ability to be impartial jurors. After the questioning, each side (the prosecution and the defense) requests that jurors be removed from the jury through a series of challenges. While some challenges need to be approved by the judge (for cause challenges) some do not require any justification or approval (peremptory challenges). Although the U.S. Supreme Court has officially prohibited the use of racially based peremptory challenges (in Batson v. Kentucky, 1986), Samuel Sommers and Michael Norton found in their research that college students, law students, and attorneys alike were more likely to remove a Black juror from jury service and were able to easily develop logical reasons for eliminating each juror. This finding may explain why so few attempts to challenge racially biased removals are successful.

When people promote jury diversity as crucial, they often stress its importance as a method to reduce racial bias in jury verdicts. To be clear, this is an important benefit of jury diversity as researchers have found that decreasing the racial diversity of a jury can increase the likelihood of outcomes that are racially biased. Yet, reducing discrimination is not the only benefit that jury diversity provides. In our research, Margaret Kovera and I found that increasing diversity on juries also increases the quality of discussion that occurs in the jury room.

Diversity and the Quality of Jury Discussion

Over the course of two studies, Margaret Kovera and I examined the effects of diversity on the deliberation process of jurors. We examined diversity in two different ways: both racial/ethnic diversity and wealth/power diversity. We wanted to examine not just jury verdicts, but the jury deliberation and discussion itself.

We recorded all deliberations and measured the level of reasoning occurring in each statement. In the first study, 433 Black and White community members viewed a mock trial and then deliberated in juries composed of four to seven jurors. The participants either viewed a stronger or weaker case as to the guilt of the defendant. Would more diverse juries be better able to differentiate between stronger and weaker evidence than non-diverse juries? Actually, no: All jurors/juries rendered verdicts consistent with the strength of the evidence. By analyzing the jury discussion itself, however, we saw that diverse juries had more sophisticated conversations and discussed the evidence at a more advanced level than the non-diverse juries.

For example, when a juror stated "He resisted going out. He didn't get up and go out right away," this was not coded as advanced-level thinking. While relevant to the case, this statement does not analyze the credibility of the statement or make inferences about how this evidence fits in the case. On the other hand, the statement "But there was a discrepancy between the defense attorney and what the defense attorney said. The defense attorney said that he stabbed in self-defense" displays critical analysis of the evidence presented.

In the second study we examined the role of wealth/power diversity, manipulated through a game that allowed our participants to obtain and give out Monopoly money so that some participants—a racially and ethnically diverse sample of 329 undergraduate students—felt (temporarily) more wealthy and powerful than others. We then created some groups where all members were alike in their wealth/power, and some groups where the wealthier and more powerful were mixed with those who were less wealthy and powerful. Our results were similar to those in the first study, with the diverse juries (in terms of wealth and power) deliberating more thoroughly with higher-level contributions in terms of reasoning.

Thus, the benefits of jury diversity go beyond reducing outcomes that are racially biased. Increasing diversity can actually have positive effects on how thoroughly the jurors deliberate—with diverse juries using more examples of high-level reasoning than non-diverse juries. The findings highlight the importance of ensuring that communities do all they can to create juries that are as diverse as possible.


For Further Reading

Bergold, A. N., & Kovera, M. B. (2022). Diversity's impact on the quality of deliberations. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin48(9), 1406–1420. https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672211040960

Peter-Hagene, L. (2019). Jurors' cognitive depletion and performance during jury deliberation as a function of jury diversity and defendant race. Law and Human Behavior, 43(3), 232–249. https://doi.org/10.1037/lhb0000332

Sommers, S. R. (2006). On racial diversity and group decision making: Identifying multiple effects of racial composition on jury deliberations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90(4), 597–612. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.90.4.597

Sommers, S. R., & Norton, M. I. (2007). Race-based judgments, race-neutral justifications: Experimental examination of peremptory use and the Batson Challenge procedure. Law and Human Behavior31(3), 261–273. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10979-006-9048-6


Amanda Bergold is an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at Marist College who studies the intersection of psychology and the legal system.

Sexism Hidden in Plain Sight

A male Walmart supervisor harassed female employees, publicly remarking that "Women are good for nothing." Yet when one of them sued, the court concluded that no gender discrimination had occurred.

What Happened?

The supervisor had unknowingly discovered an easy way to hide his sexism in plain sight: he was simply mean to everybody, men and women alike. Because he was an "equal opportunity jerk," the court found his actions weren't sexist: "The strongest inference that can be drawn from the record," wrote the judge in Dotel v. Walmart Stores, Inc., 2013, "is that the supervisor was rude to all."

When a man makes sexist comments to women, people recognize sexism immediately. But when that same man also behaves offensively to other men, people discount the sexism, or even fail to recognize it at all. Rudeness to all creates the perception that the perpetrator does not notice or pay attention to gender. But such a perception is an illusion. Sexists are perfectly capable of abusing men as well as women.

Gender Blindness versus Gender Bias

To examine the question of how rudeness to men blunts the perception of sexism, my collaborators and I ran a series of studies. First, we asked 2,100 participants to read Tweets written by former President Donald Trump.

When participants saw Trump berating women with sexist comments, they concluded Trump was sexist. But when they also saw Trump berating other men on Twitter, the more they thought he was "gender blind"—that is, they began to think that gender is not a factor in how Trump treats others. Perceptions of gender blindness were associated with perceptions of less sexism.

In another study, participants read about a manager who asked a female employee whether she "left her brain at the salon." When participants only saw his interchange with the woman, they thought this manager was sexist. But when they also read that the manager made rude remarks toward other men, they did not perceive him as sexist.

In a third study, we asked MBA students how they would handle an "equal-opportunity jerk." When participants considered examples of managers being rude to men alongside examples of sexist behavior, they were less likely to suggest those managers receive gender-bias training. Instead, participants thought what they needed was anger-management training.

Sexism Need Not be Mean—And Often Isn't

Examples of sexism that dominate popular culture are generally both sexist and rude, or worse. As a result, it's easy to categorize sexism as a form of meanness or aggression directed at women in particular. But sexism is not just about treating men and women differently. And it's not just an expression of antipathy, a way to be mean to women. Sexism is a set of beliefs and attitudes about the world, a set of false claims about women that harm them in a wide variety of ways.

Examples of such claims are that women are nice but incompetent; that women are unfit for stereotypically masculine jobs; and that women are weak, emotional, and irrational. But though these beliefs are used to subjugate women and create barriers to gender equality, rudeness and aggression are not required to deploy them.

Venn diagram showing overlap of sexism and rudenessMen who hold negative stereotypes about women can be—and often are—rude toward other men. In fact, when we consider how sexism relates to rudeness, we realize they are different categories of behavior that sometimes overlap. Seen in this light, it's not surprising that people who are generally inclined to abuse their power deploy sexism as a tool to do so in particular circumstances.

Further, sexism doesn't always manifest itself through open expressions of rudeness. And the consequences of sexism are not simply hurt feelings or negative experiences. By conflating sexism and rudeness, we miss less-aggressive forms of sexism, as well as sexism practiced by those who abuse both men and women. To move beyond false and harmful stereotypes, these are too significant for us to ignore.


For Further Reading

Belmi, P., Jun, S., & Adams, G. S. (2022). The "equal-opportunity jerk" defense: Rudeness can obfuscate gender bias. Psychological Science, 33(3), 397–411. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976211040495


Peter Belmi is the Scott C. Beardsley Associate Professor of Business Administration at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business. He studies the psychology of inequality.

Anna Reiman

Anna Reiman is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at SUNY Albany. She received her B.A. in Psychology and Philosophy from Oxford University and her Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Yale University. She completed postdoctoral fellowships at University of Exeter, UK and University of Washington, Seattle. Dr. Reiman’s research focuses on intergroup relations, morality and justice, and psychology and the law.

What are your current research interests?

In my most recent work, I’ve begun to examine cisgender folks’ notions of womanhood, manhood, and gender identity, and what the consequences of those notions are for attitudes toward transgender and gender nonbinary people. As an example, in a project I’m particularly excited about, we are studying how cisgender people’s assumptions about and interpretations of workplace sexual harassment incidents are shaped by the victim’s gender identity. How people think about gender identity is a longstanding interest of mine, but one that I haven’t really delved into until recently. All of this work is under review, in revision, or being written up, and I’m looking forward to sharing the results soon.
 

What are you most proud of in your career?

I’m proudest of the work I’ve done that has direct real-world relevance to public policy—and of the fact that all of this work has been conducted in collaboration with my students. For example, we’ve shown that how people think about the abstract notions of deservingness and retributive justice has practical implications in terms of predicting support for objectively ineffective yet punitive policies (e.g., regarding the treatment of terrorism suspects and sex offenders). As another example, our latest work examines the role of social identity concerns in explaining cisgender people’s support for anti-transgender legislation. It’s an enormous privilege to be able to contribute to these important public policy debates.
 

Do you have any advice for individuals who wish to pursue a similar career path in social psychology?

1. Find time to read, and read widely—don’t limit yourself to your area of specialization, to “top” journals, or even to psychology. Read everything! 2. Learn about power analysis early in your career; it will have a dramatic impact on how you think about study design and will enable you to ask more impactful questions. 3. Do what you love—and learn to love writing.
 

What’s the best advice you have ever received?

This advice wasn’t specifically directed at me, but reading a blog on running I once stumbled upon “you will want to stop—don’t”. This idea really stuck with me, and it now gets me through the first couple of miles of every 5K I run, spurs me to start writing that discussion section I’ve been avoiding, and generally gives me the sense that I can accomplish whatever I want as long as I want it enough. It’s pretty liberating!
 

What career path would you have chosen if you had decided to not pursue psychology?

When I was a kid, I wanted to be an archeologist. These days, I sometimes wish I’d gone to law school—I’d love to be a civil rights attorney. (That being said, I think I made the right choice with psychology!)


 

The Case for Handgun Waiting Periods

More than 33,000 people in the United States die from gun-related injuries each year, making firearms the second leading cause of injury-related death. Many of these deaths could be avoided through policy—for example, Australia all but eliminated gun deaths through a series of gun control measures that included a massive gun buyback program, an assault weapons ban, and strict gun-trafficking policies. In the U.S., the current political climate would prohibit such dramatic changes. And yet, we believe there is still room for politically viable gun legislation that will save lives.

Our recent empirical research shows that handgun waiting periods that delay gun purchases (typically by a few days) lead to large reductions in gun violence and can provide a politically acceptable revision to U.S. gun policy.

To understand why waiting periods can have a significant impact it is helpful to consider the behavioral foundations underlying such a policy. Research from behavioral economics and psychology has found that intense emotions like anger and sadness—“visceral factors,” in academic language—can cause people to take actions they later regret, such as resorting to gun violence.

Yet research also suggests that these emotions are often transitory. Given sufficient time to cool off, the types of intense negative emotions that lead to violent tendencies can pass. This suggests that inserting even a short delay in the gun-buying process has the potential to reduce gun violence, without restricting anyone’s right to own a gun. (Delaying a gun purchase might have the additional benefit of closing the window of opportunity for would-be perpetrators of violence to harm their victims.) In a recent project, we set out to test the impact of handgun waiting periods, which impose precisely such a delay, on homicides.

Continue reading the post by visiting Behavioral Scientist.


By Michael Luca, Deepak Malhotra, and Christopher Poliquin