When prior knowledge and law collide

Jurors are supposed to rely on the judge's instructions for verdict selection. However, recent research indicates that people have constructed naive representations of crimes that conflict with the judge's instructions and that influence decision making. The present research explored potential solutions to this conflict. Two experiments revealed that the problem cannot be circumvented by avoiding people's prior knowledge; subjects activated and used their prior knowledge of crimes even when the crime name was withheld. Experiment 3 demonstrated that a supplementary instruction to disregard prior knowledge was also ineffective. Experiment 4 revealed that a supplementary instruction designed to revise subjects' existing representations did improve decision accuracy. These experiments indicate that the conflict between people's prior knowledge and the law cannot easily be avoided or disregarded, but its impact can be reduced by revising people's existing concepts.     

AMBER Alerts: Are School-Type Photographs the Best Choice for Identifying Missing Children?

We investigated how well adults could recognize the faces of children when they differed in appearance from photographs shown in an alert. College students in three studies saw a mock AMBER Alert while watching a television show. The children appeared either well-groomed with positive affect (as in a school photograph) or disheveled with poor affect (as abducted children might appear). Recognition accuracy and confidence were significantly lower when the faces differed in appearance from the alert displayed during the television show. Thus, AMBER Alerts may be more effective if they are accompanied by more than one type of photograph of a missing child, particularly if a photograph is shown in which the child does not appear well-groomed and happy.