PSY328H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Real Crime, Polygraph, Episodic Memory
Document Summary
Mock crime: participants being assigned as guilty suspect or innocent ones. They are instructed to be telling the truth or lying. Field studies use situations in which people are suspects in real crime. The greatest advantage of field studies is realism. The accuracy of those result can be inflated because the context is very different. Second reason: they are not guilty like the real suspect. They are testing some facts that only the criminal would know. An innocent person will not recognize the scene. They saw 10 photographs; they will have elevated physiological arousal. Unscored buffer: the first answer option is thrown out because people tend to be nervous and react more strongly when they first saw the questions. In the simplest version of scoring, anyone with stronger physiological response to six of the 10 correct options is classified as having guilty knowledge of the crime.
