It's not just criminals who feel unsafe when the police are around

The idea that police on our streets makes people feel safer is usually taken as a given. It's the basis of the so-called "reassurance policing" agenda, which advocates higher numbers of visible front-line police. And when increased police numbers are announced, members of the public often welcome the news. "I'm all for more police on the streets," said a Chicago resident earlier this month after the announcement of increased patrols, "It makes me feel safer seeing them around my community."

A new study challenges this received wisdom. Whereas most surveys ask people to reflect on whether they'd feel safer with more visible police, Evelien van de Veer and her colleagues took a different approach, looking at how the presence of police affected people's sense of safety right at that moment.

The researchers quizzed over 200 Amsterdam residents out shopping about how safe they currently felt. For some, two to four police were currently visible patrolling the vicinity; for others no police were present. Overall, the presence of police made no difference to participants' answers. However, focusing just on the male participants - those who answered when a police patrol was nearby actually reported feeling less safe.

Next, the researchers showed 124 students pictures of a street scene and asked them to rate how safe it seemed. The photos were doctored so that some of the participants saw a police officer in the scene. The key finding here was that a graffiti-daubed alleyway was rated as safer when a policeman was in the scene, but a leafy residential street was rated as less safe when a policeman was present. This difference was found for both sexes, but was more pronounced for men.

Van de Veer and her colleagues proposed two possible explanations for what they described as this "ironic" consequence of police presence. They said the sight of a police officer could act as a warning signal, directing people's attention to potential danger in the vicinity. Or they suggested the sight of police could trigger automatic mental associations of concepts like crime or violence (this would be a social priming effect - an area of study that's currently under close scrutiny).

Why were men particularly prone to feeling unsafe in the presence of police? The researchers suggested this may be because they are more often the victim of violent crimes, and more often the cause of police needing to be called to a scene. This reasoning seems vague and van de Veer's team admitted "further exploration of this issue is required."

The researchers concluded that their findings have real-life implications for police forces and policy makers. "A general increase in the number of visibly present police officers may not have the intended effect," they said.

Past research covered on the Digest has shown that CCTV cameras can also increase feelings of insecurity; so too neighbourhood watch signs.

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van de Veer, E., de Lange, M., van der Haar, E., and Karremans, J. (2012). Feelings of Safety: Ironic Consequences of Police Patrolling. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 42 (12), 3114-3125 DOI: 10.1111/j.1559-1816.2012.00967.x

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Drunk eyewitnesses are more reliable than expected

Imagine you are on a jury: would you trust the testimony of a drunk eyewitness? In a surprising new study, Angelica Hagsand and her colleagues report that drunk witnesses performed just as reliably as sober witnesses at recognising a criminal in a line-up.

One hundred and twenty-three students (60 per cent were women; average age 25) were split into three groups - one third drank orange juice for 15 minutes; another group spent the same time drinking enough orange juice mixed with vodka to reach a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) level of .04 per cent; the final group drank enough vodka and orange to reach a BAC level of .07 per cent. This last value is just below the legal drink driving limit in the UK and USA, and is approximately equivalent to an average-sized man drinking two or three shots of vodka in that time.

Five minutes after they'd finished drinking, the participants watched a five-minute video of a man kidnapping two women at a bus stop, shot from the perspective of a witness. Close views of the man's face were available for a total 31 seconds during the film.

A week later, the participants were invited back and completed a surprise identification task. In a sober state, they saw an 8-man line-up on a computer screen that either did, or did not, feature the kidnapper who they'd seen in the film. The test administrator didn't know which condition participants were in, nor whether the culprit was present. Each participant had to say whether the culprit was in the line-up, answering either "yes", "no the culprit is not present" or "do not remember".

Although better than chance, overall performance was poor, consistent with a great deal of past research showing the limited accuracy of eyewitness memory. Crucially, for both the culprit-present and culprit-absent conditions, there was no difference in accuracy across the different participant groups. This result held even after excluding participants who answered that they could not remember.

In fact, although not a statistically significant difference, the most intoxicated (.07 per cent BAC) participants actually achieved a higher accuracy percentage than the controls in both the culprit-present (47.1 per cent vs. 38.5 per cent) and culprit-absent (56.3 per cent vs. 41.7 per cent) line-up conditions. These results contradicted the researchers' expectations. Based on alcoholic myopia theory (a loss of memory for peripheral details), they predicted that the intoxicated participants would match the controls when the culprit was present, but would make more incorrect identifications when he was absent.

The results also clash with the common sense beliefs of the general public that drunk witnesses will be less reliable than sober witnesses. Given how common it is for witnesses to crimes to be intoxicated, there's been surprisingly little research on how alcohol affects eyewitness performance. Sure, this study has its limitations - the alcohol levels used were only moderate and the crime wasn't a real event - but it makes a welcome contribution to a neglected research area.

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Angelica Hagsand, Emma Roos-af-Hjelmsäter, Pär Anders Granhag, Claudia Fahlke, and Anna Söderpalm-Gordh (2013). DO SOBER EYEWITNESSES OUTPERFORM ALCOHOL INTOXICATED EYEWITNESSES IN A LINEUP? The European Journal of Psychology Applied to Legal Context: http://www.usc.es/sepjf/images/documentos/Volumen_5/hagsand%20et%20al.pdf

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Lying becomes automatic with practice

Forget shifty eyes or fidgety fingers, psychology research has shown that these supposed signs of lying are unreliable. Liars easily learn to make eye contact, and anxiety can make honest people squirm nervously.

A more useful foundation for lie-detection is the simple fact that lying is more cognitively demanding than telling the truth. False answers therefore usually take slightly longer than honest responses, especially when a suspect is burdened with an extra mental challenge, such as telling their story backwards.

However, a new study suggests that the cognitive demands of lying can be reduced with practice. Xiaoqing Hu and his team presented 48 participants with dates, place names and other information and asked them to indicate with one of two button presses whether the information was self-relevant or not. In real life this would be equivalent to a suspect posing as a different person. Instructed to lie, the participants took longer to respond than when they told the truth, consistent with the well-established idea that lying is cognitively demanding.

Next, a third of the participants were told about the reaction time difference and given extensive practice (360 trials) at lying more quickly about the self-relevance of information. The requirement to get faster was made explicit because past research found lying practice without such an instruction was ineffective. On retesting, the trained participants in the current study no longer took more time to answer dishonestly compared with telling the truth. "Deception is malleable and its performance index can be voluntarily controlled to be more automatic," the researchers said.

Another group had no training but were told about the reaction time difference between lying and truth telling, and encouraged to answer faster when lying. They got faster at lying compared with a control group, but still they were speedier when being honest.

The researchers admitted that their sample size was small and a replication is needed with more participants. However, they said their results suggest that to be more realistic, lie-detection research based around the cognitive demands of lying should incorporate the effects of practice.

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Hu, X., Chen, H., and Fu, G. (2012). A Repeated Lie Becomes a Truth? The Effect of Intentional Control and Training on Deception. Frontiers in Psychology, 3 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00488

Also published recently: Sorting the Liars from the Truth Tellers: The Benefits of Asking Unanticipated Questions on Lie Detection.

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Who gets aggressive at the late-night bar and why?

The exhaustive analysis in Steven Pinker's latest book shows that we are living in the most peaceable age for thousands of years. To anyone who spends time in late-night bars, this might come as a surprise. In these temples to hedonism, spilled drinks and unwelcome gropes all too often provoke violent brawls.

Kathryn Graham and her colleagues trained 148 observers and sent them out to 118 bars in early-hours Toronto where they recorded 1,057 instances of aggression from 1,334 visits. Where the majority of psychology research on aggression is based on laboratory simulations (often involving participants zapping each other with loud noise or spiking each other's food with chilli sauce), Graham's team collected real-life observational data to find out who gets aggressive and why.

The researchers followed the Theory of Coercive Actions, according to which aggressive acts have one or more motives: compliance (getting someone to do something, or stop doing something); grievance; social identity (to prove one's status and power); and thrill-seeking.

Unsurprisingly, the vast majority (77.5 per cent) of aggressive acts were instigated by men. Men more than women were driven to aggression by identity and thrill-seeking motives; by contrast female aggression was more often motivated by compliance and grievance. This often had a defensive intent, as a reaction against unwanted sexual advances.

As well as being particularly severe, aggression that was ignited by patrons who felt threats to their identity was also particularly likely to escalate, "because," the researchers said, "their strong identity motivation reflects a situation where the person is already invested in winning or besting the other person." Aggressive acts motivated by grievance were also likely to escalate, because of people feeling their actions were justified.

The researchers found that greater intoxication led to more serious aggression in women, but not men - perhaps because the latter were emboldened enough already. Younger men and bigger men also tended to engage in more serious aggressive acts, replicating past research showing that larger, intoxicated men are more likely to get aggressive than their smaller counterparts.

Graham and her colleagues said their findings could help contribute to preventative policies in late-night bars. For example, given the incendiary role of identity motives in aggressive incidents, efforts could be made to challenge traditional cultural norms that say masculine identity is about power and strength. Because of the escalating effect of grievance motives, security staff could be trained to diffuse situations early - for example, by replacing spilled drinks free of charge. And because so much female aggression was provoked by sexual harassment, the researchers advised establishments to create an atmosphere that discourages "invasive and aggressive sexual overtures whilst still maintaining an exciting venue where young people can explore their sexuality and meet potential partners."

These recommendations sound well-intentioned and supported by the new evidence, but are they really achievable? What do you think?

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Kathryn Graham, Sharon Bernards, D. Wayne Osgood, Michael Parks, Antonia Abbey, Richard B. Felson, Robert F. Saltz, and Samantha Wells (2012). Apparent motives for aggression in the social context of the bar. Psychology of Violence DOI: 10.1037/a0029677

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

A simple technique for improving eye-witness memory

Thanks to the foibles of human memory, eye-witness evidence is notoriously unreliable. One attempt to help the situation was the Cognitive Interview (pdf), conceived by psychologists in the 1980s. This involves strategies such as conducting the interview in a situation that matches the original crime context as closely as possible, and asking witnesses to remember events from multiple perspectives. Although highly effective, the Cognitive Interview can be impractical and it often goes unused. Now Annelies Vredeveldt and Steven Penrod have tested a far simpler technique for improving eye-witness memory - getting them to close their eyes. Lab research has already shown that this can be beneficial. Vredeveldt and Penrod took the technique out on the streets to see if it works there too.

Ninety-six undergrads signed up for what they thought was a study into "social interactions". In groups of up to four, they met two female researchers on a New York street corner. Shortly after the participants' arrival the two women started arguing and insulting each other. The altercation ended with one of the women knocking the other woman's papers to the ground and storming off.

After they'd witnessed the public spat, the participants were led away either to another street location or the psychology lab, both being five minutes' walk. Here they were asked to recall everything they could about the event, and then they were asked a series of questions about what happened. Half the participants were instructed to close their eyes during the recall and the interview (they weren't told why); the other half were not. The researchers ensured each of the staged arguments was caught on film so that the participants' answers could be checked for accuracy.

Overall, participants who closed their eyes recalled 37.6 per cent more useful visual information about the argument, and, in questioning, they produced 23.8 per cent more correct answers coded as having high detail. The advantage of having closed eyes was most pronounced for participants who were quizzed inside. This supports the idea that the technique works by helping participants to create the original context in their mind's eye. If it worked by helping reduce distraction, you'd think it would have had more of a benefit out on the street.

"From an applied perspective, the findings were promising," Vredeveldt and Penrod said. "In free recall, the effect size of the eye-closure effect for witnesses interviewed inside (d=.88) approached the effect size obtained with the Cognitive Interview.

"Given that the eye-closure instruction requires no training or additional interview time, it could prove to be a useful alternative [to the Cognitive Interview]," they added.

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Annelies Vredeveldt, and Steven D. Penrod (2012). Eye-closure improves memory for a witnessed event under naturalistic conditions. Psychology, Crime and Law DOI: 10.1080/1068316X.2012.700313

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Judges are more lenient toward a psychopath when given a neuro explanation for his condition

Last month, a prescient editorial in the New York Times warned that a greater understanding of the neural correlates of behaviour risks having a distorting effect on the criminal justice system. John Monterosso and Barry Schwartz highlighted their own research showing that people are far more forgiving of crimes with ostensibly neurobiological causes, compared with psychological causes - a worrying demonstration of what they called "naive dualism" given that "all psychological states are also biological ones."

Now a multi-disciplinary team of psychologist Lisa Aspinwall, legal scholar Teneille Brown and philosopher James Tabery, has surveyed nearly 200 state trial court judges in the U.S., showing how their decision making is swayed by a neurobiological explanation for psychopathy.

The judges read about a case, based loosely on real events, in which a robber brutally attacked a restaurant manager who refused to hand over any money. All judges were given evidence from the prosecution or defence that said the perpetrator had been diagnosed with psychopathy - an untreatable condition. Additionally, half of them were also presented with expert evidence from a neurobiologist about the causes of psychopathy, including genetic factors. The perpetrator had been tested and had low MAOA activity - a profile, the judges were told, previously associated with increased propensity for anti-social behaviour. The neurobiologist also explained how this genetic profile leads to brain abnormalities that impair the psychopath's ability to tell right from wrong.

Compared with what they estimated to be their usual sentencing for aggravated battery (9 years), overall the judges said they would give a higher sentence to the psychopathic perpetrator in the current case - 12.93 years. This shows the criminal's psychopathy was overall treated as an "aggravating factor", a sign of utilitarian thinking on the part of the judges, in the sense that he was highly likely to be violent in the future.

However, among the judges exposed to a neurobiological account of psychopathy, the diagnosis also had a "mitigating" effect on their decision-making. Judges in this condition sentenced the attacker to an average of 12.83 years compared with the 13.93 years given by judges who didn't receive the neurobiological information. Although the judges in receipt of the neurobiology didn't agree with the explicit suggestion that the attacker had compromised free will or moral responsibility, their open-ended explanations for their sentencing suggested otherwise. The neural evidence "makes possible an argument that psychopaths are, in a sense, morally 'disabled'," said one.

Aspinwall and her team described as a "double-edged sword" the way that psychopathy, accompanied by neurobiological explanation, can have both an aggravating and mitigating effect at once. Supporting this, judges who received the neurobiological testimony, and heard the psychopathic diagnosis from the defence counsel, tended to mention "weighing" or "balancing" factors over twice as often as judges in the other conditions. "Psychopathy may make the defendant less morally culpable, but it increases his future dangerousness to society," said one. "In my mind, these factors balance out ...".

This new research adds to a growing literature showing how people seem to be particularly beguiled by neuroscientific evidence. Last year, for example, a study reported that people were more persuaded by brain-scan-based lie-detection evidence compared with more traditional lie-detection approaches. This study also isn't the first to examine the factors affecting the decision making of judges. For instance, it was shown last year that hungry judges are less forgiving.

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Lisa G. Aspinwall, Teneille R. Brown, & James Tabery (2012). The Double-Edged Sword: Does Biomechanism Increase or Decrease Judges' Sentencing of Psychopaths? Science : 10.1126/science.1219569

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

People with high emotional intelligence are more easily duped by fakers

Although research has shown that most of us are hopeless at spotting lies, there's been speculation in the literature that a minority of people might be unusually talented fib-detectors. The evidence for these "wizards", as they've been called, remains controversial. Now a new study has tested the relevance of a key psychological construct that one might imagine wizards would score highly on - emotional intelligence.

If liars betray their true emotions in early, rapid, automatic facial expressions, as some experts have claimed, it would make sense that people who are particularly adept at recognising and processing emotions (one of the hall-marks of emotional intelligence) would therefore have an advantage at spotting deception.

To test this, Alysha Baker and her team at the Centre for the Advancement of Psychological Science and Law at the University of British Columbia presented 116 undergrad participants with 20 clips of real-life press conferences featuring anguished people pleading for the return of their missing relative(s). Half the clips featured a person who was in fact later identified as the perpetrator of the crime against their missing relative. The student participants had to say whether the anxious person in each clip was genuine or being deceptive; how confident they were in their judgment; and how they'd been affected by the clip emotionally.

Overall, the the participants performed no better than chance at identifying which clips featured a liar - consistent with past research showing the difficulty of accurate lie detection. However, there was a further paradoxical finding: participants who scored highly on the "emotionality" component of emotional intelligence (pertaining to emotional expression, perception and empathy) were significantly less accurate than average at judging which of the anxious relatives was being genuine. This association was mediated by how upset the students felt about the clips, perhaps indicating that their emotional state was affecting their ability to scrutinise the videos effectively.

Moreover, higher scorers on emotionality tended to sympathise more than low scorers specifically with the people featured in the deceptive videos, suggesting they were misreading deceptive cues (such as emotional turbulence, decreased plea length and tentative word use) as signs of increased distress, rather than as signs of deception.

All the participants, but especially the high emotionality scorers, expressed misplaced confidence in their judgments about the video clips. "The present findings suggest that a reliance on erroneous information about deception, combined with unfounded sympathy for deceptive pleaders leads to a highly confident, but incorrect assessment that crocodile tears are a reflection of genuine distress," the researchers said.

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Baker, A., ten Brinke, L., and Porter, S. (2012). Will get fooled again: Emotionally intelligent people are easily duped by high-stakes deceivers. Legal and Criminological Psychology DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-8333.2012.02054.x

Previously on the Digest: Skilled liars make great lie detectors.
Also relevant: Psychopaths show less emotional leakage (HT Scott Barry Kaufman).

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Skilled liars make great lie detectors

Abagnale runs a security consultancy

Frank Abagnale Jr, the confidence trickster whose escapades inspired the hit film "Catch Me If You Can", later became a security consultant for the FBI. There's intuitive logic to the agency's recruitment strategy - if you want to catch con artists, who better to spot them than a master con artist. But does this logic apply at a more basic level? Do skilled liars really make skilled lie detectors?

Surprisingly, psychologists haven't investigated this idea before. Dozens of studies have shown that most people are very poor at detecting lies, and other research has shown that the propensity to lie is partly inherited, but no-one's looked to see if good liars make good lie spotters.

Now Gordon Wright and his colleagues have done just that, recruiting 51 participants (27 women; mean age 25) to take part in a competitive group task. None of them had met before. Arranged in groups of 5 or 6, the participants took turns to spend about 20 seconds telling the group their position on a social issue, such as whether smoking should be allowed in public places or whether they were in favour of reality TV. Their true opinions had been reported in private to the researchers earlier. On each round, cards handed to the participants told them which opinion to share with the group and whether to tell the truth or lie. The task of the rest of the group was to judge whether the speaker was lying or not. Fifty pounds was up for grabs for the best liar and the best lie spotter.

The key finding was that participants whose lies were harder to spot tended to do better at spotting whether other participants were lying (the correlation was -0.35, with an effect size of 0.7, which is usually considered large). "As far as we are aware," the researchers said, "this study is the first to provide evidence that the capacity to detect lies and the ability to deceive others are associated."

This result begs the question - what underlying psychological processes grant a person skill at lying and lie spotting? It wasn't IQ or emotional intelligence - the researchers tested for that, but they don't yet know much more. "It is clear," they said, "that identification of the precise nature of the proposed 'deception-general' ability is an important aim for deception research, and that further research should be devoted to this question."

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Wright, G., Berry, C., and Bird, G. (2012). “You can't kid a kidder”: association between production and detection of deception in an interactive deception task. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 6 DOI: 10.3389/fnhum.2012.00087

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.