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Join us for Part 1 of a two-part series “Beyond CSI” for a closer look at the exciting research being conducted by the UCI Center for Psychology and Law.
Details:
This event will include presentations by Dr. Benjamin van Rooij, Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, Dr. Peter Ditto, Dr. Jodi Quas, and Dr. Elizabeth Cauffman. The theme of this series of presentations is “The Many Faces of the Justice System: The Victims, Offenders, and Wrongfully Accused.” Each speaker will discuss the groundbreaking research being conducted in their research laboratories. Some topics that will be discussed include: Eyewitness Testimony, Morality, Child Victims, Juvenile Offenders, and Implementation of the Law. Opening remarks will be made by the Dean of the School of Social Ecology, Valerie Jenness, with closing remarks by the Dean of the Law School, Erwin Chemerinsky.
Presentations will take place from 5:30-7pm, with a reception to follow until 7:30pm. This event is free and open to the public. Co-sponsored by the Newkirk Center for Science & Society.
Please RSVP to psychlaw@uci.edu by March 3rd
Date:
March 10, 2014
Time:
5:30-7:30pm
Location:
Newkirk Alumni Center
450 Alumni Court, Irvine, CA
Speaker Bios & Presentation Abstracts:
Benjamin van Rooij is the John S. and Marilyn Long Professor of U.S.-China Business and Law and academic director of the John S. and Marilyn Long U.S.-China Institute for Business and Law. His research focuses on implementation of law in comparative perspective. Since 2000 he has studied the implementability of legislation, regulatory law enforcement and compliance, and rights invocation and legal empowerment. A central theme is how implementation of law can be improved in the context of emerging markets where weak enforcement and widespread violations of law create a vicious circle undermining compliance. Using insights from sociology of law, criminology, political science and social psychology he uses anthropological methods to study compliance behavior and motivations and public and private enforcement practices. He uses innovative fieldwork data both to seek improvement to persistent implementation problems as well as to reorient existing regulatory, criminological and socio-legal theories that so far have yet to adapt to data from countries such as China.
Presenting: Why Chinese Obey the Law
Over the last 30 years China has made tremendous progress in developing a legal system. Unfortunately in practice implementing its many new laws remains highly challenging. In many areas of law, including land rights, environmental law, food safety regulation, and intellectual property rights violations remain common. This presentation discusses why creating compliance in China is so difficult. Also it talks about what insights psychology might have that can improve implementation of law there.
Elizabeth Loftus is a Distinguished Professor of Social Ecology, and Professor of Law, and Cognitive Science. Professor Loftus studies human memory. Her experiments reveal how memories can be changed by things that we are told. Facts, ideas, suggestions and other post-event information can modify our memories. The legal field, so reliant on memories, has been a significant application of the memory research. Loftus is also interested in psychology and law, more generally.
Presenting: The Memory Factory
For at least a century, scientists have demonstrated the tricks memory can play. More recently, they have shown that people can be led to develop entire memories for events that never happened – “rich false memories.” In recent work, people have been led to remember nonexistent events from the recent past as well as non-existent events from their childhood. People can be led to falsely believe that they have had experiences that are rather bizarre or implausible. They can be led to believe that they did things that would have been impossible. False memories, like true ones, also have consequences for people, affecting later thoughts, intentions, and behaviors. False memories look very much like true ones: they can be confidently told, detailed, and expressed with emotion. These findings have implications for the pursuit of justice in legal cases, for the practices of psychotherapists who listen to patients’ memories, and for everyday life.
Peter Ditto is a Professor of Psychology and Social Behavior. His research examines the role of motivation, emotion and intuition in social, political, moral, medical, and legal judgment. His recent work has focused on motivated moral reasoning, particularly how people selectively recruit general principles and factual beliefs to support desired moral conclusions. Another key focus of his current research is partisan political bias. This work examines the multiple ways that political ideology biases our political judgments and behavior. In 2009, he received the Celebration of Teaching Professor of the Year Award.
Presenting: Intuitive Morality, Politics, and the Law
Morality is something we feel more than think. This emerging view that judgments about right and wrong are grounded in emotion and intuition rather than principled reasoning has important implications for understanding both political beliefs and behavior and reactions to crime and punishment. In this brief talk I will give an overview of my research on intuitive morality focusing on two issues: 1) how the differing moral intuitions of Liberals and Conservatives fuel the corrosive political polarization that plagues contemporary American politics, and 2) how the intuitive nature of beliefs about human free will shapes judgments of moral responsibility and appropriate punishment.
Jodi Quas is a Professor of Psychology and Social Behavior. Her research examines memory development in early childhood and children’s involvement in the legal system. Specific interests include strategies to improve children’s narrative productivity and accuracy; the effects of stress on children’s memory; emotional regulation and physiological reactivity as predictors of children’s coping with and memory for stressful events; jurors’ perceptions of child witnesses; and consequences of legal involvement on child witnesses and victims. In 2008, she was the recipient of the American Psychological Foundation’s Robert L. Fantz Memorial Award.
Presenting: False Allegations and False Denials: Opposing Challenges when Interviewing Suspected Victims of Child Abuse
During the past several decades, a great deal of attention has focused on documenting the ease with which children can be led to falsely claim that they were abused. Yet, false allegations represent only one type of egregious error that children can make. Another type, false denials, has been virtually overlooked in extant research, but their occurrence has equally devastating consequences. In this presentation, Dr. Quas will describe a program of research that she has been carrying out that involves systematically testing novel interviewing strategies that concurrently minimize children’s tendency to deny true abuse and their risk for false allegations. Findings have tremendous potential to improve justice for children, families, and communities, all of whom are profoundly affected when abuse is alleged.
Elizabeth Cauffman is a Professor of Psychology & Social Behavior, Education and Law. Her research focuses on the development, assessment, and treatment of antisocial behavior and other types of externalizing problems in adolescence. She is particularly interested in applying research on normative and atypical development to issues with legal and social policy implications, and my current work examines adolescent development in the context of juvenile justice policy and practice. Her recent work has examined developmental trajectories among delinquent populations, factors associated with female offending, and maturity of judgment as it develops during the course of adolescence (in both delinquent and non-delinquent populations).
Presenting: Arrested Development: Adolescent Development and Juvenile Justice
Recent research on adolescent psychological and brain development suggests that deficits in maturity (e.g., impulse control, future orientation, resistance to peer influence) explain a great deal of the increased risk-taking and poor decision-making observed in the second decade of life. The goal of this presentation is to understand how these developmental changes relate to the trajectories of criminal behavior among adolescent offenders. Understanding these developmental changes is imperative as findings from this research have been incorporated into amicus briefs to the Supreme Court which disallowed life sentences as well as capital punishment for crimes committed as a juveniles.
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