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Associations with Guilty using the DRM Paradigm /
Evidence Priming List Associations (Study 3)
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Description: In the real world, high-quality evidence should lead to more convictions than low-quality evidence. Jury decision making research has, to some extent, supported this premise (e.g., Cutler, Dexter, & Penrod, 1989 Kovera, Gresham, Borgida, Gray, & Regan, 1997; Devine, Clayton, Dunford, Seying, & Pryce, 2000; cf. Levett & Kovera, 2008; McAuliff & Duckworth, 2010). These findings suggest that any method that would cause someone to view a specific type of evidence as higher quality would cause a corresponding increase in association for that evidence with guilt as more false alarms in “guilty” DRM list. Conversely, any manipulation that leads someone to see a particular form of evidence as being poorer quality would equally decrease the association between that evidence and guilt. Thus, if we can influence how people view the quality of a specific form of evidence, such strengthening or weakening the association between that evidence and guilt would be measurable with our DRM paradigm in the form of more (or less) false recall. Priming is one such method that may cause such a shift in association strength, because it has been used successfully to influence how people false alarm on a DRM task (Lenton, Blair, & Hastie, 2001; Takarangi et al., 2007). In our study, we would prime participants with information regarding the quality of each form of evidence. It is likely, however, that some forms of evidence are more resistant to priming than others. Forms of evidence that are more closely associated with guilty, such as confession and DNA, would likely require extremely strong manipulations to influence that association. Weaker-associated evidences, such as eyewitness and fingerprints, that sometimes (but do not always) lead to a guilty verdict, may be more susceptible to such priming, because a person’s belief in their reliability may be easier to shift. Therefore, in Study 3 we ask, can priming participants with evidence quality affect the evidence’s association with guilt in a DRM paradigm? Pilot testing was conducted to create "evidence prime paragraphs." Although it took several iterations, the primes were developed to be short vignettes describing a criminal case where a person was correctly (positive) or wrongfully (negative) convicted based primarily on a single piece of evidence (the form of evidence contained in the DRM list they see).