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An increasing number of criminal court cases have seen psychologists present their findings as evidence after conducting experiments and surveys to evaluate the credibility of witnesses' statements and suspects' false confessions. Courts, however, have not always welcomed psychological findings. As some courts have not affirmed the value of these findings in some well-known cases, some researchers suggest that courts have little trust in psychological findings. To consider the validity of this suggestion, we conducted a quantitative investigation of the courts' decision-making processes when presented with psychological findings in 50 criminal cases. The results showed that most of the courts' judgments involving psychological findings were negative, and that the reasoning for the judgments could be classified into nine categories. The most common reasons were related to the methodological flaws used to derive the psychological findings.

The pivotal topic of the debate regarding criminal code amendment involves expanding the scope of punishable acts to include “sex without consent.” In this context, this study aimed to exploratorily investigate how the public estimates sexual consent, focusing on gender differences. Specifically, 500 respondents were asked to read a scenario depicting two characters in a sexual situation and presented with possible 30 reactions one character could take when she/he was asked to engage in sexual intercourse. Subsequently, they were asked to estimate the degree to which the character consented when she/he had taken a particular reaction. Exploratory factor analysis extracted three factors: explicit nonconsent, implicit nonconsent, and implicit consent. Although three reactions loaded on different factors in female and male samples, a three-factor structure was maintained in the analysis using gender-specific samples. Multi-group confirmatory factor analysis revealed no significant differences in the scores of the three factors between the samples. These results suggest that sexual consent/nonconsent has a more complicated graduation than the present debate, and future possible amendments must consider this complication.