Psychology 2990A/B Study Guide - Eyewitness Identification, Jury Trial, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 2990A/B
• Professor: Doug Hazlewood

Document Summary

All the steps in the legal process are intensely social psychological. In recent years social psychologists have studied legal system a lot because: it"s a good applied setting to study psychological processes, it is very important in daily life. In countries such as canada, the legal system assigns a great deal of significance to eyewitness testimony: e. g. , thomas sophonow. The eyewitness testimony that was near scene of crime was enough to convict him twice. The most common cause of an innocent person being convicted is an erroneous eyewitness. We can"t record an event, store it over time, and then play it back accurately. To be an accurate eyewitness, a person must complete 3 stages of memory processing: acquisition, storage, retrieval of the events witnessed. Acquisition- the process by which people notice and pay attention to info. In the enviro: people can"t acquire everything around them so they acquire a subset of info. around them.