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Mind Changer and Game Changer
APS Past-President Elizabeth Loftus, University of California, Irving, is the highest-ranking female in the list of top 100 psychologists. She’s gained world-wide renown for her experiments showing that memory, far from being an accurate record
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Unusual suspects: How to make witnesses more reliable
The Economist: To identify a suspect, police typically ask eyewitnesses to pick him out of a line-up of similar-looking folk. Alas, this method is often inaccurate. DNA testing has shown that witnesses often fail to
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The Certainty of Memory Has Its Day in Court
The New York Times: Witness testimony has been the gold standard of the criminal justice system, revered in courtrooms and crime dramas as the evidence that clinches a case. Yet scientists have long cautioned that
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False Confessions Confuse Forensics
Scientific American: Confessing to a crime usually is not enough to throw you behind bars. Many states require independent evidence to corroborate a confession. But if a suspect confesses and forensic investigators know, it can
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Is Neuroscience the Death of Free Will?
The New York Times: Is free will an illusion? Some leading scientists think so. For instance, in 2002 the psychologist Daniel Wegner wrote “It seems we are agents. It seems we cause what we do…
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From the Lab to The Courtroom
The law deals fundamentally with human behavior. It deals with choices people make — to do right or wrong, to lie or tell the truth. It deals with perceptions and memories — what color shirt
