PsychWorld

Techniques such as Good Cop / Bad Cop are popular among police and police tv shows such as Law & Order. Other techniques, such as those used by the CIA, include waterboarding or others forms of coercion. Yet, being the good cop may be the best way to get a confession according to new research from the University of Montreal.

Have you ever tried to convince a friend to follow your political views in an area you both disagree on (perhaps abortion, or euthanasia, or gay marriage, or marijuana legalization)? If so, the two of you probably ended up leaving the discussion with your original beliefs fully intact or even stronger than before you “talked”. So if it’s so hard to change your friend’s mind about his or her political views, how can voters change their minds from voting Democrat or Republican every election season? According to NPR, it’s not the voter’s minds that change, it’s who votes!

Figuring out whether a person is lying or not is hard. Police officers are trained in the sophisticated Reid Interrogation Technique to try to intimidate the suspect into spilling the beans. But a well-trained criminal will know how to resist these tactics. The polygraph test is probably the most reliable method of detecting a lier, but that too has its flaws and could be fooled. In either case, both the Reid Technique and the polygraph, rely on words. What about trying something new such as pictures?  According to a new study described by Psychology Today, a picture maybe worth more than a thousand words, especially when it comes to catching a criminal.

According to a new study published by the Association of Psychological Science, terrorists become suicide bombers because they have a “fused” personality type. Supposedly, people with “fused” personalities have a bond much stronger than just simple group identification with their group and are willing to take extreme action to protect that group, including sacrificing themselves for the group. The researchers use this “newly discovered” personality type to explain why terrorists are willing to become suicide bombers. I guess it’s easier to blame terrorism on a personality type which differs “them” from “us” than to focus on what really makes someone willing to commit a terrorist act, like not having basic human needs met for example. Before terrorists became terrorists, they were just like you and me. So let’s focus on what would make your and my personality type become a terrorist. 

The American legal system is not as “just” as they teach you in school. From lawyers encouraging you to keep suing, to letting attractive people get away with murder, to accepting unreliable eyewitness testimony as the only testimony against you, and sending sick people to jail instead of helping them, the American legal system needs a major uplift. Now, new research described in LiveScience adds another challenge to a common legal practice: using paid expert testimony.

Whether you realize it or not, psychology plays a huge part in law enforcement. Applying psychology to criminal justice can increase your likelihood of settling a lawsuit, improving police efforts in your county, and even decreasing the recidivism rate in our country. July’s new applied psychology research includes predicting when a terrorist will attack and rethinking treatment of child delinquents and adolescent sex offenders.

I’m very patriotic and love America more than most Americans, but when it comes to effectively fighting danger on the roads, I have to give props to the French. Instead of giving tickets to speeding drivers this summer, the French Police are using basic psychological principles to instead reward good drivers during the dangerous summer months as described by NPR. I believe this use of positive reinforcement will be very effective, and can only hope American police follows the French in this case.

Traditionally, defendants purposely avoid apologizing to the plaintiff because an apology is an admission of guilt and will only increase the payout in legal disputes ranging from wrongful firings to injury cases. However, according to new research described in ScienceDaily, apologies can actually be beneficial to the plaintiff if done correctly.

As professional Trial Consultants have known for a long time, the legal system is not as fair as it’s supposed to be and can be manipulated for a negotiable fee.   If you play a little with jury selection, as O.J. Simpson did in his trial, you might just get a “get out of jail free” card. After all, juries are made up of people, and people are naturally biased against other people. Confirming this, researchers at Cornell University recently found that unattractive defendants are 22% more likely to be convicted of a crime than good-looking ones as described by CBS news. In addition to increased chances of ending up in jail, unattractive defendants also get sentenced for an average of 22 months more prison time than attractive ones.

A seriously mentally ill person is more likely to be sent to jail than the hospital according to a new report described by USA Today. The report by the National Sheriff’s Association and the Treatment Advocacy Center found that in every single state in the USA, someone with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, for example, is more likely to be incarcerated than hospitalized. In some states, such as Arizona, a person is nearly 10 times more likely to be jailed than hospitalized. And no, this is not because the mentally ill are evil, it is because we, as a society, fail to take care of people who clearly sick.