WHAT WE THINK ABOUT WHEN WE THINK ABOUT CRIME I

Information-processing; Schema Theory; eyewitness memory; jury decision-making; how to dress for court and why

It was in the 1950s that psychologists started treating the human mind as an information-processing device. Why the 50s? The reasons are many, but we can summarise them in a single phrase: ‘computer science’.

Don’t worry: this is going to be a great deal more interesting than it sounds.

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

The modern computing era was just getting started. Psychologists, finding it difficult to study something as abstract as ‘the mind’, realised that traction could be gained by treating it as if it were a computer. There are plenty of similarities. Information goes into a computer. The computer does things to the information. Other, different, information comes out. Take your laptop, for instance. You can load information onto it, via the keyboard, mouse, scanner, or whatnot. The system does things to that information - it performs certain procedures (the name we give to that is ‘computing’). Different information comes out. It may do so via the screen, the speakers, the printer, or whatever. Of course, the exact nature of the output will depend on which piece of software (which ‘program’) you happen to have loaded at the time. The exact same procedure will give you different output, depending on whether you’ve loaded Word or Excel or SPSS. (SPSS, by the way, stands for Statistical Package for the Social Sciences – a program every psychologist has to know about. It’s the law.)

Now, imagine that you’ve just installed a new program onto your laptop and you want to learn how to use it. You have two options. The first (which no sane person has ever taken) is to read the manual. Be honest: you’re not going to do that. The second – and this is what you actually do, I bet – is to mess about with it. You try some things out and see what happens. You load up the program, use the keyboard, mouse, or scanner to provide input, and look at what comes out. By comparing the input with the output, you hope to figure out what happened inside the plastic box. Don’t argue: You do do it that way. You know you do. Again, it’s the law. (OK, maybe you don’t. Good for you. Stop looking at me like that.)

If you are at all like me, you are very likely to come to an abrupt decision: ‘This program doesn’t work. I’m going to uninstall it’. The manual never even enters into the equation.

Since your brain doesn’t come with a manual, you can conceive of it in the same way. It is functionally equivalent to the hardware that you have sitting on your desktop or kitchen table right now. You load information onto it through your eyes (by reading this latest zingy newsletter from Crime & Psychology, for instance), or your ears (listening to a podcast about Forensic Psychology) or your fingertips (the feel of the keys as you click Like and Restack. Give it a go). Let’s say that, later on today, you explain to a friend everything you have read here. Your explanation counts as the output. By comparing it with the input, a psychologist might be able to figure out something about your memory program and how it works.

Let’s say our psychologist is trying to figure out something to do with eyewitness memory (that’s how I used to make my living, many years ago). How well do people remember details of a crime that they’ve recently seen? Our psychologist’s approach will be based on this analogy with computer science. First, they may expose a ‘participant’ (as we call them in Psychology) to a specially-made film of a staged crime. They may then wait a short while, before asking the participant to recall the crime. The film represents the input. The participant’s account represents the output. By comparing one with the other, the psychologist might learn something interesting about the software that processed the information – that is, the ‘eyewitness memory’.

In other words, our psychologist figures out what happened inside the ‘plastic box’ – except that, in this case, the box isn’t actually plastic. It’s bone. What’s inside the box is what’s inside the eyewitness’ skull.

By carefully varying features of the input, and checking their effect on the output, the psychologist hopes to find out various details about the processing that takes place. It’s unlikely that we will ever learn everything there is to know about eyewitness memory (or anything else, for that matter). That isn’t the nature of science. With every new experiment, though, our knowledge becomes a little greater; our ignorance a little smaller.

By the way, if you’d like to read a little more about how this process works, you’re in luck. I explained it all in an earlier newsletter, extravagantly entitled ‘The Causes of Crime’. You can check it out here.

Let’s take another example. Perhaps our psychologist is interested in sentencing decisions that take place in court. Under what circumstances do jurors vote for execution? Our psychologist may expose a group of potential jurors to vignettes that describe a criminal and his crimes. (‘Vignettes’ are short, specially-made stories that we sometimes use in Psychology experiments.) The psychologist may ask the jurors whether or not the death penalty is appropriate in each case. For the purpose of this example, the vignettes represent the input. The jurors’ decisions represent the output. Again, by carefully varying the features of the input, and checking their effect on the output, the psychologist might hope to find out what influences the jurors’ sentencing decisions.

This approach to human thinking (or cognition) is made really explicit in the famous Modal Memory Model. I’ve included a picture here.

This particular information-processing model was first proposed more than 50 years ago, yet it remains a solid guide to the basics of human memory.

Information enters the human memory system through our various sensory receptors, in the form of sights, sounds, smells, and so on. It’s held for a passing moment in the sensory memory stores. To get a feel for how they work, try staring at this screen for 2-3 seconds (don’t blink). Look away at a blank wall or tabletop. You should be able to ‘see’ the screen for a short time, even though you are no longer looking at it directly. That’s your iconic memory in action: your visual system’s memory store. Now try something else. Grip the edge of your table or chair tightly for a moment and then let go. You should be able to ‘feel’ the ghost of its presence for just a moment in your fingers, even though you are not touching it. This, too, is your sensory memory in action. In this case, the system is called haptic memory.

Sensory memory is designed to stitch our world into a single unit and thereby help us understand how the features of our environment hang together.  It’s useless, though, for carrying out most of the conscious, everyday tasks we have to cope with. It doesn’t help us add up numbers, say, or buy the appropriate items at the grocery store, or even remember the meaning of the first sentence in the paragraph we happen to be reading. For tasks like those, we need the Short-Term Memory.

A lot of the information that enters our sensory systems simply gets lost. You can see that in the diagram above. It’s the arrow marked Forgotten. Some, though, makes its way further up the information-processing system. Let’s say I ask you to remember a telephone number. I read it out loud to you. Your phone is in the next room, so you have to keep the number in your mind while you fetch it. How will you do that?

Very likely, you’ll just keep repeating the number to yourself over and over until you start to dial it. That’s what the arrow on the diagram, labelled ‘Maintenance’, refers to.

You may well forget the number once you’ve dialled it. After all, why bother to store it in your memory system? You have it in your phone now, so to store it in your mind as well would be wasteful. To remember it would be, so to speak, an inefficient use of your processing resources.

Even so, the number may stick with you for some reason. Perhaps the digits make a pattern that is meaningful to you: your birthdate, maybe. In that case, you may still be able to remember the number tomorrow, or even next week. If so, we could infer that the information had been passed even further up your processing system – this time, to the Long-Term Memory. That’s the system psychologists are investigating when they study eyewitnesses’ memories of crimes that happened last year, or when they develop new interrogation techniques for getting the truth out of suspects. As you can imagine, the Long-Term Memory is a vast, deep, mysterious affair. You might think of it like those big blank spaces you see on medieval maps of the world, Terra Incognita.

Now, you may look at that diagram and think it all looks a bit complicated. Can so much really be happening inside the skull of the typical human being, going about their everyday business? That question brings us on to a second, vital feature of Cognitive Psychology: the concept of ‘limited capacity processing’.

The concept is associated most often with Daniel Kahneman. You may well have heard of him. For a psychologist, he is a bit of a celebrity, owing to his Nobel Prize and his bestselling book, Thinking, Fast and Slow (available right now in an airport near you). In 1973, Kahneman proposed that our attention system could do only a finite amount of work. Very like your phone, or laptop, it refuses to run too many programs at once, or handle data-files that are simply too bulky.

Inside our skulls, we human beings may possess the most powerful information-processing devices in the known universe, but even so we can’t cope with absolutely everything that an infinitely complex world has to throw at us. To prevent ourselves from getting overwhelmed, we have to marshal our resources. We have to behave like ‘cognitive misers’ and expend our limited capacity in the most penny-pinching fashion. We have to make sure we waste as little as possible.

To get away from the information-processing metaphor for a moment, imagine your cognitive system as a car with exactly enough fuel in the tank to get to your destination. It will do the job you require of it, but only if you are very very careful. You’d better check the tyres aren’t flat. Only use the headlights if absolutely necessary. Don’t switch on the radio. All these things use fuel.

There are endless important implications for Forensic Psychology.

What happens when you try to get your laptop to do too much information-processing at any one time (or run one program too many)? It hangs up, because it doesn’t like it. In other words, it does not have enough capacity to do everything you want from it. (Equally, a car that has only a limited amount of fuel can go only so far.)

Try to do too many cognitive tasks yourself, and you may experience something similar to a computer hanging up or a car running out of fuel. Your brain won’t literally show you the blue screen of death, or grind to a halt, of course, but you may become frustrated and overwhelmed and unable to focus on anything at all. Some Psychology professors I know, overburdened with demands, might even throw something at a wall in annoyance. ‘It’s all too much!’ we say.

Take a concrete example. You could quite easily listen to the weather forecast, eat cornflakes, and talk to your spouse or flatmate about what you did yesterday – all at the same time. The situation would probably present few if any processing difficulties. But try something more involved – try simultaneously to eat spaghetti, listen to an opera, and discuss limited-capacity processing – and you’d probably struggle. There would simply be too many demands on your processing system and too few resources to handle them.

When you encounter something with which you are very familiar – let’s take a really quotidian example, like a fork – it would be inefficient to treat it as if it were some brand-new object, utterly unprecedented in its uniqueness. Why spend time looking at it, investigating all its properties, and working out how to use it, when you’ve surely encountered hundreds of forks before? It’s considerably more efficient just to go ahead and eat your dinner. In your mind, you already possess a rich, complex, abstract knowledge-structure to do with forks. In the interest of efficiency, it makes sense simply to apply that knowledge-structure to the fork you happen to be holding in your hand. It’s the same for any other object or phenomenon you encounter often - whether it’s cutlery, Wednesdays, psychologists, or neat and nifty newsletters on Substack.

In fact, you needn’t have encountered an object or phenomenon very often – or even at all – in real life. You may possess similar knowledge-structures for ideas or objects or people you’ve actually never encountered at all. You and I probably know quite a lot more about, say, light sabers, Mafia Dons, and car-chases from fiction than we do from our own experience. Even so, our abstract knowledge structures would help guide our behaviour if ever we do encounter them in real life. Indeed, even real-life Mafia Dons have been known to model their own behaviour on Marlon Brando in The Godfather. Even real Mafia Dons encounter more Mafia Dons on the screen than they do in real life, and act accordingly. Police officers sometimes report felons saying things like, ‘It’s a fair cop, guv,’ when they are arrested. They got that from television. Burglars, too, meet a lot more fictional burglars than real ones.

Photo by Abhishek Koli on Unsplash

The name we give to these knowledge-structures is schemata, which is the plural of the word schema. Academic Psychology has an entire area known as Schema Theory. It’s fascinating stuff.

Let’s think again about our topic: Crime & Psychology. Here’s one example. Hardly anywhere in the Western world is the cognitive system more overloaded than in the courtroom. There may be days of testimony to process, complex legal arguments to understand, the demands of the judge, input from other jurors…plus a complex, unfamiliar, detailed, somewhat-threatening, physical and psychological environment. Let me tell you from my own experience, it can become overwhelming. Under such circumstances, we’d expect cognitive misers to lean pretty heavily on their schemata. That is one reason why physically-attractive defendants are more likely to be found not guilty than their less-attractive peers. ‘Beautiful is good’ says one well-known schema. By the same token, we can easily understand why lawyers and defendants always dress their best for court: No one dressed as nicely as that could possibly be guilty. No one wearing a suit and tie could possibly be lying.

(At least, that’s the usual way. I once saw a defendant turn up in court with his tie knotted so that the thin end hung all the way to his waist and the thick end only hung as far as the first button of his shirt. Someone said, ‘They should lock him up just for tying his tie like that’. Again, that’s Schema Theory in action. But what the holy hell was his lawyer thinking?)

By the way, nothing I have said here should be taken as a defence of prejudice or social stereotyping. Cognitive Psychology may be useful in explaining why certain things happen, but that doesn’t necessarily make them good, right, or proper. We call that the Naturalistic Fallacy. Maybe we’ll look in more detail at it in another newsletter, at another time.

That is probably enough cognitive psychology to load on you for this week. You have limited capacity, after all!  Next week, we’ll expand a bit on what we’ve said this time, before thinking about how it informs the study of eyewitness memory, moral panics, and conspiracy theories. I’m looking forward to it, and I hope you are too! If you’d like to support my work, I’ve thoughtfully provided some bright blue buttons for you to bip below: