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In Miranda v. Arizona (1966), the U.S. Supreme Court established the alleged safeguard that suspects in custody must be informed of their Fifth Amendment rights. Despite the risks of self-incrimination, 80-90% of suspects waive their Miranda rights (Leo, 1996) and agree to talk to the police. Anecdotal and empirical evidence suggests that a driving force of this decision may be a suspect’s fear that remaining silent will make them look guilty (Kassin & Norwick, 2004), and exploratory research suggests that this may be the case (Shaffer & Case, 1982; Sukumar, 2017). If exercising one’s rights is perceived as incriminating, this has important implications about how this alleged constitutional protection can backfire. The current research seeks to validate the exploratory findings that exercising one’s Miranda rights is viewed as incriminating (Sukumar & Kassin, 2017). Further, in light of a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that suspects must, counterintuitively, say that they would like to exercise their right to silence in order to end an interrogation (Berghuis v. Thompkins, 2010), the current study will also investigate how simply remaining silent influences perceptions of the suspect. Participants will read six vignettes describing criminal investigations. Three of the vignettes will include information about how the suspect responded to the Miranda warning; three will be filler vignettes. In the experimental vignettes, the suspect talks to the police (i.e., explicit Miranda waiver), sits in silence during the police interview (i.e., implicit waiver), or exercises their rights (i.e., right to silence and/or an attorney; invocation). After evaluating the suspect in each vignette, participants will provide their opinions about police legitimacy and answer questions about their perceptions of Miranda as a safeguard and the frequency of certain Miranda decisions.

This is the second experiment in our "Perceptions of Guilt in Trial Convictions versus Plea Bargain Acceptance" study.

This is the second phase of the third experiment in a three-study project examining whether eyewitnesses’ verbal or numeric confidence reports are more diagnostic of identification decision accuracy. In this experiment, participant-evaluators will view eyewitnesses’ verbal confidence statements from Phase 1 and will translate the verbal statement into a percentage. We will then compare the diagnostic value of eyewitnesses numeric and verbal (translated by evaluators to numeric) confidence statements.

Recent research on legal judgments of Black and White individuals suggests that people evaluate Black individuals more favorably than White individuals. The goal of the current research is to test whether enabling participants to establish “moral credentials” that they are not racially prejudiced before they provide a legal judgment of a Black individual reverses this pattern of responding.

This research will test people’s evaluations of Black and White targets in legal and non-legal contexts.

Two unpublished studies have shown that people respond more favorably to Black exonerees than to White exonerees. The current study will test mechanisms underlying this effect. Specifically, we will test whether individuals’ motivation to respond without prejudice (Plant & Devine, 1998) and/or self-monitoring (Snyder, 1974) moderate the tendency to respond more positively to Black than to White exonerees. We will also test whether perceiving greater legal-system bias against a Black than a White exoneree accounts for the tendency to respond more favorably to Black than to White exonerees.

A follow up study that manipulates the race of the defendant in both the first and second case the participants review.

This research will test whether evaluators’ perceptions of an eyewitness’s confidence calibration underlies the effects of contextual information about poor witnessing conditions on evaluations of highly confident eyewitness-identification testimony.

Supplemental material, SmithSupplementalMaterial for Increasing the Similarity of Lineup Fillers to the Suspect Improves the Applied Value of Lineups Without Improving Memory Performance: Commentary on Colloff, Wade, and Strange (2016) by Andrew M. Smith, Gary L. Wells, Laura Smalarz and James Michael Lampinen in Psychological Science