<aside> 👋🏽 This course focuses on applications of psychology to the administration of justice. Drawing from the areas of social, personality, cognitive, and developmental psychology, we will look critically at the processes of criminal justice. We will compare the law’s informal theories of human behavior with what psychologists know on the basis of empirical studies. We will cover a number of contemporary topics including police-civilian interactions, custodial interrogations, false confessions and guilty pleas, forensic evidence, deception detection, eyewitness identifications, alibi generation and corroboration, repressed and recovered memories, and jury selection and decision-making. We will also discuss methodological issues associated with conducting research in psychology and law.

Note. This course is not easy in terms of workload, because it is a 300-level empirical course. But if you spend the necessary time to do all your assignments thoughtfully, you will get a good grade and really enjoy the course!

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<aside> 👋🏽 Prerequisite(s) PSYC 201 and PSYC 242 or PSYC 221

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<aside> 👋🏽 Difference, Power, & Equity. We will explore the differing dynamics of power between legal actors and consider the psychological and structural factors that contribute to vulnerability, coercion, and inequality in the justice system. Through discussions of race, age, body, gender, disability, and stigmatized identities, this course will encourage students to challenge assumptions of objectivity and fairness in our legal system.

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Course Structure

💬 Seminar

During the seminar portion of the course, we will use lecture, class discussion, and group activities to explore the existing research in the field of Psychology and Law with an eye to research methodology, future research directions, and real-world implications of the research.

📊 Lab

Lab sessions will focus on the development of your research projects based on course readings and topics, including conducting a literature search, designing your experiments, creating experimental materials, analyzing your data, drafting a clear and compelling scientific manuscript, and providing feedback on your classmates’ manuscript drafts. These semester-long projects will be conducted mostly collaboratively in pairs, though final paper submissions must be completed independently. This means that while you may collaborate on what sources to include in your final papers, all manuscript writing should reflect your own words.

<aside> ⚠️ Warning about sensitive material: At several points in the semester, we will discuss sensitive material. For example, we will discuss cases of sexual assault as well as cases regarding allegations of child sexual abuse. If you are concerned about this material, please speak with me ahead of time so that I can alert you to days on which sensitive material might be presented or readings in which it might be encountered.

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Course Material