Brian H. Bornstein - US grants

This project will examine mistaken eyewitness identifications as a principal source of erroneous convictions. Although a growing body of empirical research by psychologists provides insights into the factors contributing to mistaken identifications, and with increasing frequency, psychologists are called upon to provide courtroom testimony about those factors. Such expert testimony, however, is often criticized as unreliable. This project will examine the empirical questions of reliability and generalization of findings using a meta-analysis of existing studies of face recognition, in both the eyewitness and laboratory research paradigms. In particular, the project will examine the strength and reliability of research findings concerning a large number of factors thought to influence identification accuracy and the relationships among research methods and the magnitude of effects produced by manipulations of substantive variables. Factors to be addressed include stable (e.g., sex, race) and malleable characteristics (e.g., stress, disguise) of both participants and targets, as well as situational (e.g., exposure duration) and procedural (e.g., lineup presentation) variables. Careful attention will be given in the meta-analysis to the different types of study characteristics, independent variables, and their operationalization employed in the research. The project, as a result, will identify research and theoretical domains where findings are on the strongest and weakest footings and, most importantly, will test a series of hypotheses about methodological and substantive factors that enhance or limit the generalizability and theoretical implications of research results.

This study will determine whether religious and non-religious appeals used by lawyers in closing arguments affect the decision-making of jurors. Cognitive-experiential self-theory (CEST) predicts that affect caused by religious appeals will lead individuals to process information experientially (i.e. relying on emotions) instead of rationally (i.e. relying on logic). This study will use CEST to determine whether religious appeals influence processing type and lead to decisions made in legally impermissible ways. Finally, the project will investigate the effects of directives regarding how to make the sentencing decision. The experimental methodology employs a written trial summary, edited jury instructions, and a verdict form, all of which are based on an actual trial. Participants will read the summary and instructions and will indicate their sentencing decisions on the verdict form. Participants will also complete a written task designed to measure type of decision-making strategy used.

This project proposes and tests a theoretical model of institutional confidence that will be evaluated in the context of water regulatory institutions. This institutional confidence theory posits that changes in knowledge of and experiences with governmental institutions will affect not only levels of confidence in the institution, but also the bases used to make institutional confidence judgments. The central hypothesis is that people rely on different factors to determine their trust and confidence in a specific institution, depending on their extent of knowledge and experience with that institution. Thus, it is hypothesized that when a person has limited experience with and knows little about an institution, institutional confidence assessments will be driven by one's general disposition to trust. As one gains knowledge and experience, perceptions of the institution's trustworthiness will determine institutional confidence. With more experience, stable attitudes of loyalty or cynicism will increasingly account for confidence judgments. The methods used to test the theory are 1) validation of measures of water-related institutional constructs on two different samples; 2) a cross-sectional, community study of institutional confidence in water-regulatory institutions; and 3) a longitudinal study of confidence in water institutions.

The project is one of the first programs of research to focus on confidence in institutions that regulate water resources. These studies will provide an understanding of what specifically drives confidence attitudes and perceptions in water-related, governmental institutions. Important implications of this research include 1) effective governance for water-related institutions, given that trust and confidence in government has been shown to be associated with compliance and acceptance of governmental decisions; and 2) application to other governance contexts, such as courts and municipalities, two other governmental institutions previously studied by the research team.

Are witnesses who are accurate at identifying a suspect?s face in a lineup consistently accurate at identifying suspects or in saying what happened during a crime? Given that erroneous eyewitness testimony contributes to wrongful convictions and that jurors give great weight to eyewitness testimony, knowing whether witness accuracy is stable would be helpful. Traditional eyewitness research does not answer these questions, as most studies examine eyewitness memory for only a single witnessed event. Thus, this project seeks to investigate: (1) the stability of witness memory performance, both within and across witness tasks (e.g., lineups, witness reports of criminal events, and resistance to misinformation) and (2) the strength of a number of individual difference variables, including personality and cognitive traits, in predicting eyewitness performance.

The project will examine the stability of witness accuracy both within and across witness accuracy tasks (lineup identification accuracy; accurate memory of the events; and resistance to misleading post-event information about the events) for five brief witnessed events across multiple study sessions. The use of repeated witness tasks for five separate witness events will permit a more sensitive, more generalizable measure of witness accuracy than in prior research.

The stability of witness accuracy has important broader impacts for decision makers (e.g., jurors, prosecutors, police officers, etc.) in the criminal justice system in evaluating the probable accuracy of witness statements or conflicting statements of different witnesses, given that real world witnesses need to be accurate in both their identifications and their event reports regarding a crime. Further, the proposed procedure may provide a new paradigm for investigating witness accuracy. The project will also support the training of a graduate student and expose undergraduate research assistants to the research process.

This project funds a postdoctoral fellow in interdisciplinary trust and confidence research. Public trust and confidence in governmental institutions is integral to democracy and necessary for effective and efficient governance. What does it mean, though, to say there is trust or distrust? The vast majority of studies and theories in trust and confidence are immersed only in one discipline, often ignoring contributions from other social sciences. This proposal funds a postdoctoral fellow, who could come from any social scientific discipline, to join an interdisciplinary team dedicated to developing and testing a comprehensive, multi-stage, interdisciplinary theory of trust and confidence in governmental institutions. The fellow will conduct relevant research and also bring together additional, interdisciplinary researchers interested in advancing trust/confidence research and theory. The interdisciplinary research is being conducted in a variety of settings and contexts where the findings will have practical implications: courts, law enforcement, municipal government, water regulation and natural resource management agencies, and science, including nanotechnology and agricultural biotechnology.

Measurement of trust and confidence and its relationship to knowledge about governing institutions is extremely important to the governing institutions the research team engages. The team has been communicating results of their research to the community organizations; the postdoctoral fellow will be closely involved in coordinating information sharing with governing institutions.

The Workshop will advance trust research by bringing together senior and junior researchers from a variety of social science areas (including criminology, law, management, political science, psychology, public administration, and sociology) who are interested in moving toward integrated theories of institutional trust.

Intellectual Merit: Trust in institutions is critical to governing and the functioning of organizations, courts and judicial systems, and so on. Despite so many disciplines studying trust-related issues and influencing trust-related policies, there is relatively little in the development of an integrated framework of institutional trust and confidence. The Workshop will incorporate multiple research areas to build trust theory and quality measures of trust. It extends the work of researchers who have focused on measuring trust, confidence, and perceived legitimacy and justice. By bringing together insights from diverse researchers, the Workshop will advance knowledge on trust and confidence, contributing to areas of social science and furthering the goal of an integrated understanding of trust. Incorporating multiple research areas has great potential to transform our understanding of this topic.

Broader Impacts: Measuring trust is essential for policymaking. Lack of trust in government has been a source of frustration across the political spectrum, and officials seek to regain public trust in various institutions. Relatedly, in business, enhancing trust is core to success. Thus, better understanding trust has tremendous potential to assist society. The researchers involved in this Workshop will continue influencing institutions and organizations through their consulting services and research publications. The Workshop will also aid junior researchers and students, exposing them to leaders across areas of social science, and offering the opportunity participate in the development of an accompanying book on trust. Finally, we will prepare a final report so that this Workshop?s contribution can be used as a model for other research projects and gatherings.

Juries often rely on and interpret evidence based on scientific research when making decisions in civil and criminal cases. The validity and reliability of scientific information varies, yet jurors generally are non-experts who do not possess the necessary tools to differentiate between weak and strong scientific information when making decisions. To assess the issue of interpretation of scientific evidence in court, this project uses an experimental approach to examine jurors' ability to interpret and act on scientific evidence. To do so, this project consists of jury simulations that will examine jurors' and juries' sensitivity to strong versus weak scientific information presented in court.

The project includes two jury simulation experiments designed to test whether fuzzy trace theory, a well-developed theory in cognitive science, applies in the context of jury research, particularly when compared to other safeguards for jury decision making with respect to scientific evidence. This multidisciplinary, multi-method research will examine when and how jurors' inferences are appropriately calibrated to the strength of scientific information, whether a safeguard derived from decision-making theory can improve that calibration, and how various measures relevant to the processing of scientific information are related to one another. The project addresses fundamental questions about how humans reason with and make inferences and decisions based on the quality of relevant scientific data.