Harvard

Abstract

The following position paper was presented by a five-man delegation from the Harvard CCAS chapter to the embassy of the People's Republic of China in Paris on February 20, 1969. The group included Thomas Engelhardt, Cheryl Goodman, and Jon Livingston, all graduate students at Harvard, Neale Hunter, an Australian who spent 1965–67 teaching English in Shanghai, and Jonathan Mirsky, Director of Dartmouth's East Asia Center, who was unable to go to Paris but helped compose the statement.     

Decision-Making in court: Observing the sentencing of men and women

Abstract

Using systematic observation together with an analysis of the relevant court and criminal records this research examined the processing and sentencing of a small number of male and female defendants in an English magistrates' court. The findings indicate that sentencing was indirectly affected by a defendant's sex and directly affected by at least one aspect of a defendant's demeanour. These results provide support for the view that combining systematic observation with an analysis of court records offers a more effective means of investigating the differential treatment of male and female defendants than either unsystematic observational studies or the analysis of court records alone.     

The effects of the cognitive interview and other methods of context reinstatement on identification

Abstract

Can reinstatement of encoding context aid eyewitness identification? Two experiments are reported in which participants were asked to identify, from both a Blank and a Filled lineup, a target seen 1-week (Experiment 1) or 3-months (Experiment 2) earlier in a staged live interaction. Identifications were made following either a no context reinstatement (NCR), a CI-type reinstate context (CI-CR), a mental and physical (M&PCR) context reinstatement or a multiple reinstatement of context (Multi-CR) manipulation. In Experiment 1 in the Blank lineup condition, correct rejection (CR) and false identification (FID) rates did not differ between the four context manipulation conditions. However, within the different conditions only Multi-CR showed a significant difference between CR and FID. In the Filled lineup condition, neither correct identification (CID), FID, nor non-identification (NID) rates differed between context conditions. Within the four context conditions only Multi-CR produced significantly more CID than FID. However, the difference between CID and NID in this condition did not differ reliably. In Experiment 2, with the Blank lineup, while the rate of CR did not differ between the three context conditions, the rate of FID did, with Multi-CR producing reliably fewer than the other two conditions. In the Filled lineup condition, no differences between the three conditions for NID or FID were observed but a difference did appear for CID, with CI-CR producing the greatest number of hits. These variable results are discussed in terms of the need to consider other factors in explaining supposed context effects on recognition.