The growth of research in psychology and law during the last decade is easy to document. The Annual Review of Psychology has included two chapters on the subject, the first in 1976 and the second in 1982. In 1981 the American Psychological Association approved a new Division of Psychology and Law and selected that theme for the 1982 Master Lecture series at its convention. New journals (e.g., Law and Human Behavior) and collections of articles (e.g., Sales, 1981; Kerr and Bray, 1982; Konečni and Ebbeson, 1982) have reported on the burgeoning literature.

In this study the instrumental and symbolic perspectives on public support for the death penalty were directly compared within the context of a single survey of citizen attitudes. The results suggest that both instrumental and symbolic concerns influenced death penalty support. When the relative influence of the two factors was directly assessed, the symbolic perspective was found to exercise the major influence upon support for capital punishment, while the influence of instrumental crime-related concerns was small. These results suggest that death penalty support is one aspect of general political-social ideology, rather than a response to crime-related concerns or experiences.

Since most crimes investigated by police result from notification by victims, crime victims can be viewed as the gatekeepers of the criminal justice system. This paper describes the results of a series of studies which employed multiple methodologies to investigate the decisions of property crime victims to notify the police. The four methods used in this research included (a) an archival analysis of police records, (b) interviews with crime victims, (c) simulation studies using college students, and (d) experiments in a field laboratory. Two convergent findings emerged from the data. Social influence was found to be an important determinant of both the decision to call the police and the delay in such notification. If others advised the victim to call the police, the crime was more likely to be reported, but, ironically, the greater the number of people consulted, the longer the delay in reporting the crime. The second convergent finding was that situational factors played a stronger role in affecting delay in notification than did characteristics of the victim. Situational factors included the type of crime and the time of day when it was discovered, as well as the number of others talked to and the type of advice received from them. Several divergent findings across methods raised questions about the relative adequacy of each method for the problems being investigated, and helped identify sources of similarities and differences in the conceptual and operational definitions employed.

The polygraph's widespread use in the legal setting and elsewhere should be of concern to society, but especially to psychologists and lawyers. Since lying does not produce a measurable physiological response-and hence renders “lie detection” meaningless-the plausibility of the theory of so-called lie detection tests is questioned. Empirical evidence is presented that disputes the accuracy of testing and shows the high rate of false positive misclassification (e.g., misclassifying a truthful person as deceptive). An alternative procedure is recommended. This procedure, sometimes called the Guilty Knowledge Test, has some problems associated with its use and can be used only when particular information is available. However, it can be a significantly more accurate detector of guilt than the standard lie detection test.

This paper reports observations from a series of formal and empirical studies of the process of assessing the probative value of evidence in the cascaded or hierarchical inference tasks commonly performed by fact finders in court trials. The formal research develops expressions that prescribe how the ingredients of various forms of evidence can be coherently combined in assessing the probative value of evidence. These expressions allow identification and systematic analysis of a wide assortment of subtle properties of evidence, many of which are commonly recognized in evidence law. The reported empirical research was designed to evaluate the consistency with which persons actually assess the probative value of evidence when they are asked to make these evaluations in several equivalent ways. Results show that persons, when required to mentally combine a large amount of probabilistic evidence, exhibit certain inconsistencies such as treating contradictory testimony as corroborative testimony and double-counting or overvaluing redundant testimony. However, when people are asked to make assessments about the fine-grained logical details of the same evidence, these inconsistencies do not occur.

The complexity and linguistic construction of jury instructions can inhibit jurors' ability to comprehend and apply the law. Study 1 analyzes questions asked by actual deliberating jurors in order to identify sources of juror misunderstanding in criminal pattern jury instructions. Instructions concerning “reasonable doubt,” criminal “intent,” the use of evidence concerning prior convictions, and the general duties of jurors, are selected for further investigation. Study 2 uses videotaped trial materials to pinpoint linguistic problems that confuse jurors and interfere with their abilities to accurately comprehend and apply the selected pattern jury instructions. Available knowledge concerning psycholinguistics is then applied to rewrite the troublesome instructions; in addition, legal expertise is consulted to help assure that the rewritten instructions are legally valid. Study 3 demonstrates that the rewritten instructions improve jurors' understanding relative to Pattern or No instructions. Overall, the research indicates the availability to the criminal justice system of improved methods for instructing jurors accurately and effectively in the law.

Discretionary legal decisions have become a recent focus of theory development and policy-oriented applied research. We investigated parole release decision making in Pennsylvania from both orientations. Analyses of post-hearing questionnaires and case files from 1,035 actual parole decisions revealed that the Parole Board considers institutional behavior and predictions of future risk and rehabilitation in the decision to release on parole. Predictions seem also to be based on diagnostic judgments identifying causes of crime such as personal dispositions, drugs, alcohol, money, and environment. A one-year follow-up of 838 released parolees showed that predictions were virtually unrelated to known post-release outcomes. An actuarial prediction device was developed that is more predictive than subjective judgments. The use of decision guidelines to structure discretion is discussed, as well as the utilization of our research in guideline development by Pennsylvania.