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Category: Project

Description: Could some concepts be so closely associated with guilty that they are practically inseparable? If so, the automatic association could explain why people sometimes seem to skip over careful consideration and instead immovably believe in another's guilt. For example, both real-life cases and laboratory research demonstrate that confession evidence is very convincing – even when it should not be. Could this be due to an automatic association between a confession and guilt? We propose to test this possibility using a Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) list, which measures automatic associations by presenting participants with a list of words that are thematically related but, importantly, lack the word describing the theme (“critical lure”). When the association between the list words and the theme is sufficiently strong, participants incorrectly report seeing the critical lure. We hypothesize that participants will show more false recall for seeing “guilty” on a Guilty-themed DRM list when the list includes concepts that are automatically associated with guilt (such as "confession", "DNA," or "perpetrator"). Although our previous research on this topic found no significant effects, we propose here to address limitations of that research in three studies using an Amazon MechanicalTurk sample. The 7 Word List Associations study (Study 1) will address a possible ceiling effect by decreasing the associative strength of our Guilty list. The Story Format Associations study (Study 2) will increase external validity by presenting our DRM List as a DRM Story – a narrative format that provides context for the list words. The Evidence Priming List Associations study (Study 3) will look at the possible effects of priming evidence quality on the association to guilty. The Moniker List Associations (Study 4) will test whether different monikers for a person going through the legal system (e.g., victim, witness, suspect, defendant, perpetrator) are automatically associated with guilt to varying degrees. This project could reveal why some evidence is so convincing, and it will be the first study of its kind to measure unconscious associations between legally-important concepts and guilt.