Seeking justice with science
By Debra Poole
Parents usually crack a smile when they tell their version of a familiar story. One mother I’ll call Leslie was filled with embarrassment when her daughter confessed that a preschool teacher had put her in time-out for pulling a wad of hair from a schoolmate’s head. There was only one problem with the story: It wasn’t true. A talk with the teacher revealed that, in fact, a boy had pulled hair and been in time-out, but apparently the event was interesting enough to be borrowed for bragging rights. Another child regaled her dad with a story of her (nonexistent) horse, which he traced to a tale the child had recently heard.
I’ll spare one of my grown children the humiliation of relating his physically impossible report from age 3 – a hysterical description of a dream that was accompanied by the muffled query, “Mommy, why did you do it? Why did you do it?” But it was this story (along with other absurdities of life with two preschool children) that gave me a different view of the infamous McMartin preschool case in the 1980s, a case in which more than 300 children were “identified” as having been abused in ways that, citing a summary from Wikipedia, “defied the laws of physics.” (You know that a legal case has captured the public imagination if it is summarized in Wikipedia.)
This and other similar cases from the 1980s and early 1990s were all it took for dozens of research psychologists from around the world to walk into their laboratories with the same idea: Let’s figure out how this happens. I was one of those psychologists.
There is an easy explanation for why the laboratory is the only place to ferret out why young children sometimes tell wild tales about their lives. In actual cases involving alleged abuse, murder, or other legally important events that children might have witnessed, no one knows what really happened. As a result, adults debate endlessly with no resolution. Scientists solve this problem by involving children in staged events that are videotaped – so everyone knows the true state of affairs – and then mucking with their minds.
In an early set of studies funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, we interviewed children six times, three times immediately after an event and three times two years later. In each interview, we gave them open-ended prompts (“Tell me what happened”), specific questions, (“Did the man hurt Melanie?”), and questions that were impossible to answer (“What does the man do for a living? What is his job?”). In another set of studies funded by the National Science Foundation, we asked parents to read a book to their children that described some events the children had actually witnessed in our laboratory and some they had not. Over the years, we have bored children with long lists of yes-no questions, used interesting props and pictures to help them describe events (which only makes matters worse), and traced the stability of true and false reports over time. Along the way, we have shown videotapes of accurate and implanted testimonies to adults and asked them to decide which were which, asked clinical psychologists how they decide that someone was abused, and even explored the weight professionals place on science versus intuition when they face difficult decisions involving many pieces of evidence.
The collective results of our efforts can be summarized in one sentence: Nothing about human behavior is the way you think it will be. Throw away intuition – it’s a terrible guide for how the mind is organized and how people act. After more than 20 years of research, I might hold the record for never having made a single scientific prediction that was true. (If you know someone who has beaten this record for length of a run of prediction failures, please write me.)
As it turns out, you can interview children six times and shake nary an answer -– if you don’t ask certain types of questions. But you can encourage about a third of preschoolers to make a false report of bodily harm after just four minutes of interaction with an adult who never lies to them (go figure). Interviewing methods that seem child-friendly really aren’t, adults haven’t a clue which children are reporting events accurately and which are not, and many professionals who play critical roles in putting people in jail are still betting on intuition.
My field – forensic developmental psychology – has a long way to go. Nonetheless, the merger of basic research in language and cognitive development with legal issues is an excellent example of how science can inform public policy. Although professionals do not always follow established protocols for how to investigate cases involving child witnesses, at least now there are procedures that help adults interview children – procedures that do not elicit reports that 200 people who aren’t even missing were killed and buried in the woods, or that witches flew across the room. (You can see a model protocol at www.michigan.gov/documents/FIA-Pub779_13054_7.pdf.) And unlike the situation that existed 20 years ago, there is a widespread belief that children have a right to be understood, which means they have a right to answer questions they understand and to work with mental health and legal professionals who have more than a passing knowledge of child development.
My work in the laboratory spills over into the classroom. If you are a college professor, it doesn’t get any better than being a forensic developmental psychologist. From the steady stream of students who pass through my office, it appears I’m not the only person with a serious Law and Order addiction. A few years ago, the volume of students who were tracking me down because they wanted to be criminal profilers for the FBI (a job category that doesn’t exist at the FBI) became so large that I posted a flier about psychology law on our department’s advising Web site. And in the classroom, there is nothing like a good criminal case (especially if it is a sex crime) to wake up the back row during a lecture on memory. The topics I deal with on a daily basis are intriguing, and my interest in criminal issues has spread to the two children who still teach me the most about life. (My son is a police officer and my daughter, who studies the biological underpinnings of psychopathy, is visiting a convict as I write this essay.)
But the story of forensic developmental psychology is more than a tale about how human passion and the architecture of the mind create interesting legal puzzles. It is also a story about how to educate the next generation. Without exception, the students who find my office want to know where they should go to school to get “stamped” to be a forensic developmental psychologist. This is a surprisingly difficult question, because I never got stamped. Although there are an increasing number of psychology law programs, such programs didn’t exist at the critical point many years ago when it suddenly became handy to have people around who knew a lot about child development, eyewitness testimony, and just about anything related to sex. Even today, most trial experts are experts because they happen to know a lot about a small piece of something that is useful to the courts – not because they have a degree related to legal issues.
The point is that it’s a mistake for universities to try to anticipate exactly what people will need to know and then construct programs to teach them those things. Narrowly defined technical programs are useful, but such programs will never help society solve the new problems that inevitably arise.
The best way to protect our future is to teach people to think critically about issues, no matter what the topics are, and to give them a basic background in history, human behavior, mathematics, and science. Today, the game of life involves knowing where to go to find information and then having enough background knowledge to make some sense out of just about anything. These basic forensic skills are the currency of the world.
Debra Poole is a psychology professor at CMU. She drafted the forensic interviewing protocol for the state of Michigan and is the author of Investigative Interviews of Children: A Guide for Helping Professionals (American Psychological Association, 1998). Her latest book, The Story of Human Development, was released by Prentice Hall in January.
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Debra Poole
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