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Texas Is About to Execute a Woman for Her Daughter’s Death. But She May Well Be Innocent
The clock is ticking. On April 27, the state of Texas is scheduled to execute by lethal injection 53 year-old Melissa Lucio. In 2008, Ms. Lucio was convicted largely on the basis of a confession for the alleged murder of her two-year-old daughter, Mariah. Now her attorneys have filed a clemency petition to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles. They point to evidence indicating that the child died from injuries resulting from an accident, not murder. I did not work on this case and am not privy to the entire case file, so I am not in a position to argue for Ms. Lucio’s actual innocence.
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False Confessions: A Current Matter of Life and Death
On April 27, Melissa Lucio is scheduled to be executed in Texas for the alleged murder of her 2-year-old daughter. APS James McKeen Cattell Fellow Saul Kassin explains how the psychological science on false confessions relates to this life-or-death case.
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Detecting Bullshit
When Carl Bergstrom worked on plans to prepare the United States for a hypothetical pandemic, in the early 2000s, he and his colleagues were worried vaccines might not get to those who needed them most. “We thought the problem would be to keep people from putting up barricades and stopping the truck and taking all the vaccines off it, giving them to each other,” he recalls. When COVID-19 arrived, things played out quite differently. One-quarter of U.S. adults remain unvaccinated against a virus that has killed more than 1 million Americans.
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What the Second-Happiest People Get Right
In 2007, a group of researchers began testing a concept that seems, at first blush, as if it would never need testing: whether more happiness is always better than less. The researchers asked college students to rate their feelings on a scale from “unhappy” to “very happy” and compared the results with academic (GPA, missed classes) and social (number of close friends, time spent dating) outcomes. Though the “very happy” participants had the best social lives, they performed worse in school than those who were merely “happy.” ...
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Does Religion Make People More Ethical?
Do children need religion to grow into good people? Sixty-five percent of Americans think so. And even though younger adults have been leaving traditional faiths in droves, about 48% of them still hold this view. The result is a lot of conflicted parents. While they don’t necessarily miss going to church, synagogue or mosque, they do worry that without some sort of religious education, their kids might not grow into morally upstanding people. So while many leave formal religion behind in their 20s and 30s, they slowly, and often somewhat reluctantly, begin to return when they have kids.
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Algorithms, Lies, and Social Media
There was a time when the internet was seen as an unequivocal force for social good. It propelled progressive social movements from Black Lives Matter to the Arab Spring; it set information free and flew the flag of democracy worldwide. But today, democracy is in retreat and the internet’s role as driver is palpably clear. From fake news bots to misinformation to conspiracy theories, social media has commandeered mindsets, evoking the sense of a dark force that must be countered by authoritarian, top-down controls. This paradox — that the internet is both savior and executioner of democracy — can be understood through the lenses of classical economics and cognitive science.
