The Miranda penalty: Inferring guilt from suspects' silence.

Objective: Despite the risks inherent to custodial police interrogation, criminal suspects may waive their rights and submit to police questioning in fear that exercising their rights or remaining silent will make them appear guilty. We tested whether such a penalty exists.

Hypotheses: We predicted that people would perceive suspects who invoke their rights or sit in silence during an interrogation as more likely to be guilty than those who waive their rights.

Witnessing-condition information differentially affects evaluations of high- and moderate-confidence eyewitness identifications.

Recent research on the eyewitness confidence-accuracy relationship reveals that confidence can be highly diagnostic of accuracy when the identification evidence is collected using pristine procedures (Wixted & Wells, 2017) and in the absence of suspect bias (Smalarz, 2021). Some researchers have further argued that eyewitnesses who make high-confidence suspect identifications are highly likely to be accurate even if they experienced suboptimal witnessing conditions (Semmler et al., 2018).

The stigma of wrongful conviction differs for White and Black exonerees.

Objective: Black people are disproportionately targeted and disadvantaged in the criminal legal system. We tested whether Black exonerees are similarly disadvantaged by the stigma of wrongful conviction.

Hypotheses: In Experiment 1, we predicted that the stigma of wrongful conviction would be greater for Black than White exonerees.

Counterintuitive race effects in legal and nonlegal contexts.

Objective: Despite documented racial disparities in all facets of the criminal justice system, recent laboratory attempts to investigate racial bias in legal settings have produced null effects or racial-bias reversals. These counterintuitive findings may be an artifact of laboratory participants' attempts to appear unprejudiced in response to social norms that proscribe expressions of racial bias against Black individuals. Furthermore, given pervasive stereotypes linking Black people with crime and heightened attention to issues of racial injustice in the legal system, laboratory participants may be especially likely to attempt to appear unprejudiced in studies examining judgments of Black individuals in legal as opposed to nonlegal contexts.

The role of social desirability and establishing nonracist credentials on mock juror decisions about Black defendants.

Objective: Recently, experimental work on racial bias in legal settings has diverged from real-world field data demonstrating racial disparities, instead often producing null or potential overcorrection effects favoring Black individuals over White individuals. We explored the role of social desirability in these counterintuitive effects and tested whether allowing participants to establish nonracist moral credentials increased their willingness to convict a Black defendant.

Hypotheses: We predicted that establishing nonracist moral credentials would increase convictions of Black defendants-especially for participants likely to harbor racial bias and external motivation to control it.

Eyewitnesses' free-report verbal confidence statements are diagnostic of accuracy.

Objectives: We assessed recent policy recommendations to collect eyewitnesses' confidence statements in witnesses' own words as opposed to numerically. We conducted an experiment to test whether eyewitnesses' free-report verbal confidence statements are as diagnostic of eyewitness accuracy as their numeric confidence statements and whether the diagnostic utility of eyewitnesses' verbal and numeric confidence statements varies across witnessing conditions.

Hypotheses: We hypothesized that eyewitnesses' verbal and numeric confidence statements are both significantly associated with identification accuracy among choosers and that their diagnostic utility holds across varying witnessing conditions.

Mobilization and resistance in response to interrogation threat.

This research tested whether the perception of threat during a police interrogation mobilizes suspects to cope with interrogation demands and bolsters their resistance to self-incrimination pressures. Experimental procedures led university undergraduates (N = 296) to engage in misconduct or not, thereby making them guilty or innocent. An experimenter then accused all participants of misconduct in either a threatening or nonthreatening way.

An expected cost model of eyewitness identification.

This article presents an expected cost model for evaluating and comparing the performance of eyewitness identification procedures. The model estimates the expected cost of an identification procedure in order to quantify how well the procedure helps the police achieve the investigation goal of identifying and incriminating the culprit. We first apply the expected cost model to analyze five major procedural reforms, including showups versus lineups, filler similarity, administrator influence, lineup instruction, and presentation format.

Defendant stereotypicality moderates the effect of confession evidence on judgments of guilt.

This research examined whether criminal stereotypes-i.e., beliefs about the typical characteristics of crime perpetrators-influence mock jurors' judgments of guilt in cases involving confession evidence.

A biphasic process of resistance among suspects: The mobilization and decline of self-regulatory resources.

We conducted two experiments to test whether police interrogation elicits a biphasic process of resistance from suspects. According to this process, the initial threat of police interrogation mobilizes suspects to resist interrogative influence in a manner akin to a fight or flight response, but suspects' protracted self-regulation of their behavior during subsequent questioning increases their susceptibility to interrogative influence in the long-run. In Experiment 1 (N = 316), participants who were threatened by an accusation of misconduct exhibited responses indicative of mobilization and more strongly resisted social pressure to acquiesce to suggestive questioning than did participants who were not accused.

The perfect match: Do criminal stereotypes bias forensic evidence analysis?

This research provided the first empirical test of the hypothesis that stereotypes bias evaluations of forensic evidence. A pilot study (N = 107) assessed the content and consensus of 20 criminal stereotypes by identifying perpetrator characteristics (e.g.

Eyewitness identification: Bayesian information gain, base-rate effect equivalency curves, and reasonable suspicion.

We provide a novel Bayesian treatment of the eyewitness identification problem as it relates to various system variables, such as instruction effects, lineup presentation format, lineup-filler similarity, lineup administrator influence, and show-ups versus lineups. We describe why eyewitness identification is a natural Bayesian problem and how numerous important observations require careful consideration of base rates. Moreover, we argue that the base rate in eyewitness identification should be construed as a system variable (under the control of the justice system).

Confirming feedback following a mistaken identification impairs memory for the culprit.

This research examined whether confirming postidentification feedback following a mistaken identification impairs eyewitness memory for the original culprit. We also examined whether the degree of similarity between a mistakenly identified individual and the actual culprit plays a role in memory impairment. Participant-witnesses (N = 145) made mistaken identifications from a "similar" or a "dissimilar" culprit-absent photo lineup.

Post-identification feedback to eyewitnesses impairs evaluators' abilities to discriminate between accurate and mistaken testimony.

Giving confirming feedback to mistaken eyewitnesses has robust distorting effects on their retrospective judgments (e.g., how certain they were, their view, etc.

How factors present during the immediate interrogation situation produce short-sighted confession decisions.

Suspects have a preexisting vulnerability to make short-sighted confession decisions, giving disproportionate weight to proximal, rather than distal, consequences. The findings of the current research provided evidence that this preexisting vulnerability is exacerbated by factors that are associated with the immediate interrogation situation. In Experiment 1 (N = 118), a lengthy interview exacerbated participants' tendency to temporally discount a distal consequence when deciding whether or not to admit to criminal and unethical behaviors.

PERPETUAL FOREIGNER IN ONE'S OWN LAND: POTENTIAL IMPLICATIONS FOR IDENTITY AND PSYCHOLOGICAL ADJUSTMENT.

The perpetual foreigner stereotype posits that members of ethnic minorities will always be seen as the "other" in the White Anglo-Saxon dominant society of the United States (Devos & Banaji, 2005), which may have negative implications for them. The goal of the present research was to determine whether awareness of this perpetual foreigner stereotype predicts identity and psychological adjustment. We conducted a series of studies with 231 Asian Americans and 211 Latino/as (Study 1), 89 African Americans (Study 2), and 56 Asian Americans and 165 Latino/as (Study 3).