Seminar in Legal and Psychological Science

Catalog description

This course introduces students to the interdisciplinary field of legal psychology, with a focus on cognitive, developmental, and social science contributions to legally-relevant questions. The seminar blends reading, discussion, active learning, and applied exercises to help students develop and evaluate research proposals in any aspect of psychology that is broadly relevant to the law. Among the themes that will be discussed are suggestibility, memory reliability, forensic interviewing, facial processing, and decision-making in legal contexts. Students will read foundational and contemporary research, engage in weekly discussions, and design their own hypothetical research project that relates to one or more course themes. An emphasis will be placed on students developing their own hypotheses and methods for testing them. These are not limited to themes that are researched by the instructor, hence this is an opportunity to think outside the box, uninhibited by the research conducted by the instructor. This last sentence deserves amplification: Students are not expected to develop studies that are related to those of Professor Ceci; the idea is to come up with a study of your own and defend it against criticisms by the class. In the past members of 4230 have developed many interesting hypotheses unrelated to the instructor’s own program of research.