The susceptibility of child witnesses to suggestion

This article deals with the reliability of child witnesses, in particular from the viewpoint that child witnesses should be treated with suspicion because their memories are very susceptible to suggestion. An experiment is reported, in which grade 3, grade 6, and college students were compared on their ability to recall events from a film, in the face of (mis)leading questions from an interrogator. The data showed that the grade 6 students were equal to the college students in memory capacity and in their ability to resist suggestion. The grade 3 students were inferior to the older subjects in these areas. However, the results from a second testing session led to the conclusion that although the younger children appeared to submit to suggestion much more readily than the older subjects, the effect of suggestion on actual memory was not significantly different for the three subject-groups. The implications of these findings are discussed with reference to the present status of child witnesses in Anglo-Saxon law systems.     

Insanity plea

Examining 484 consecutive criminal cases in which the NGRI plea was made, it was found: (1) a high degree of interexaminer agreement existed on the issue of the defendant's mental state in a nonadversary examination procedure; and, (2) court verdicts were highly congruent with the opinions expressed by examiners on the issue of insanity.     

Need-efficiency trade-offs in the allocation of resources: Ideological and attributional differences in public aid decision making

We examined whether ideological differences influenced perceptions of the underlying causes of public aid applicants’ predicaments, and whether in turn ideology-patterned attributions accounted for how resource allocators prioritized need- and efficiency-related goals in allocating aid. To examine the need-efficiency trade-off, participants (N=112) divided a hypothetical pool of aid applicants for subsidized health insurance into two “incorrect” allocation outcomes: false alarms (allocate aid to unneedy applicants) and misses (deny aid to needy applicants). Moreover, to examine beliefs about the absolute percentage of aid applicants who are truly in need of societal assistance, participants divided the remaining aid applicants into two “correct” allocation outcomes: hits (allocate aid to needy applicants) and correct rejections (deny aid to unneedy applicants). Results of a series of structural equation models indicated that conservatism was linked to the causal belief that aid applicants’ predicaments arise from dispositional rather than situational factors, which in turn predicted a preference for making efficiency-related over need-related resource allocation judgments (e.g., preferring misses to false alarms) and the belief that a relatively small number of aid applicants are truly in need of societal assistance (e.g., preferring correct rejections to hits). Results are discussed in terms of how ideologically driven attributions influence the manner in which people resolve need-efficiency trade-offs inherent in the context of public aid decision making.