Papers by Melissa A Baker
In the present studies, participants viewed a brief staged video of a physical confrontation betw... more In the present studies, participants viewed a brief staged video of a physical confrontation between a police officer and a civilian. Participants were then asked if the police officer had used excessive force. When people view videos of police officer-civilian confrontations, their judgements concerning the use of excessive force by officers are likely constrained by various framing factors. Our studies were designed to investigate the effects of two different contextual frames on participants' judgements of police officer use of excessive force. 1) We investigated how informational frames accompanying a confrontation video, might frame judgments about use of excessive force, and 2) we investigated how demographic frames, or demographic characteristics, might frame judgments of excessive force. In Study 1, an informational frame warned participants that the confrontation video captured a very brief segment of an event that transpired over a longer period of time. In Study 2, the video was accompanied with an informational frame in which a rationale for the activity of the police officer was explained. Police officer gender was experimentally manipulated in both studies: participants saw a video of either a female or a male police officer affecting an arrest. Participant demographic information was also collected. Logistic regression analysis showed that judgments of excessive force were related to participant demographic characteristics but not to police officer gender. The informational frames appeared to have no effect on excessive force Am J Crim Just
Crowdsourcing is a research tool of particular interest to behavioral forensic psychologists. Beh... more Crowdsourcing is a research tool of particular interest to behavioral forensic psychologists. Behavioral forensic psychology is usually thought of as an applied science with a focus on the behavior of people interacting with components of the legal system. For forensic psychologists, one important advantage of crowdsourcing is that crowdsourced samples might be more representative of people interacting with the legal system than typical college student samples. We discuss this and other advantages and disadvantages of crowdsourced samples in the context of demographic data collected from 1,874 crowdsourced participants involved in a study of eyewitness memory. Our analyses of the demographic data from this study showed that crowdsourced samples are more heterogeneous than college samples along a variety of dimensions but that neither sampling procedure produces samples representative of the general American population.
Uploads
Papers by Melissa A Baker