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Social
Psychology Program
Research Interests
My research and scholarship deals with two topics within the
psychology-and-law specialty. The first is the study of
entrapment. Entrapment is a defense used by a defendant charged
with a crime, in which the defendant acknowledges that he or she
committed the criminal act but should not be found guilty
because his or her action was instigated by actions of
law-enforcement personnel. My research has taken two paths;
first, along with several honors students, I developed an
attitude scale to measure attitudes toward police sting
operations and the use of entrapment as a defense. Several
factor analyses have led to somewhat inconsistent findings, but
in general the factors that emerge reflect, first, a support for
whatever the police need to do to catch criminals. and second, a
concern that innocent individuals may be enticed to commit
crimes. The second path, reflected in the work of doctoral
student Vanessa Edkins and me, deals with the qualities that
influence jurors' decisions whether to accept or reject the
defense of entrapment. The two that emerge strongly are the
extent of coercion used by the police to get the person to
commit a crime and the past history of the defendant with regard
to criminal activity. We continue to test the limits of these
two factors on jurors' verdicts and reactions to the entrapment
defense. We also are working on a comprehensive book on the
entrapment defense.
My second topic of interest is Supreme Court decision making. My
interests cover several specific questions, such as: Can the
votes of justices and the outcomes of cases be predicted? What
makes a justice a success or a failure on the Court? For the
first, I am using a data set composed of statistical and expert
predictions of all votes and all decisions in a recent term of
the Supreme Court (2002-2003). Second, I am analyzing the
records of justices now available to the public.
Selected Publications
Posey, A., & Wrightsman, L. S. (In press.)
Trial consulting.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Wrightsman, L. S., & Fulero, S. M. (2005).
Forensic psychology (2nd ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Edkins, V. A., & Wrightsman, L. S. (2004). The
psychology of entrapment. In D. Lassiter (Ed.),
Interrogations, confessions, and entrapment (pp. 215-245).
New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum.
Wrightsman, L. S. (1999). Judicial decision
making: Is psychology relevant? New York: Kluwer
Academic/Plenum.
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