The psychology of telling murder stories: do we think in scripts, exemplars, or prototypes?

Abstract

According to the story model of Pennington and Hastie, jurors collect information at trial and modify it with general knowledge to create case stories. Schank and Ableson argue that human memory is organized to tell and understand stories. However, Finkel and Groscup questioned the use of manipulated, experimenter-constructed narratives to demonstrate the existence of multiple prototypical crime stories. We interviewed 76 jury eligible, death qualified citizens and asked them to imagine a first-degree murder scenario, describing the events that led to the killing. We coded the presence of dichotomous variables in the resulting stories and identified at least three shared story prototypes using cluster and profile analysis. We conclude that people do not store crime stories as simple prototypes and comment on the implications of this finding for legal decision-making.

Is this Injury Reasonable? Do Psychological Injury Expectations Affect Mock Jurors' Legal Decisions in a Sexual Harassment Case?

“…In fact, multiple schemas exist in criminal cases involving insanity (Skeem & Golding, 2001), murder (Wiener, Richmond, Seib, Rauch, & Hackney, 2002), rape (Ryan, 1988), assault, burglary, and kidnapping (V.L. Smith, 1991).…”

What Counts as Rape? The Effect of Offense Prototypes, Victim Stereotypes, and Participant Gender on How the Complainant and Defendant are Perceived

“…Because of this, jurors in rape or sexual assault cases are likely to draw on their existing knowledge or cognitive schemas to interpret what happened and how blame should be apportioned (Ellison & Munro, 2010; Pennington & Hastie, 1992). In generating these accounts, research has repeatedly demonstrated that people are influenced by schemas, which encompass both crime prototypes (Finkel & Groscup, 1997; Smith, 1991; Wiener, Richmond, Seib, Rauch, & Hackney, 2002)—cognitive representations of the typical or ideal features present in a particular crime—and stereotypes—simplified evaluative cognitive representations of the people involved in the crime. It is therefore critical to understand how jurors use these schemas to interpret information and form impressions about the blameworthiness of the defendant and the complainant.…”

Understanding how police officers think about mental/emotional disturbance calls

“…Studies that have measured schema have used qualitative methods initially to identify schema domain and elements. Several have used traditional prototype methodology , asking respondents to picture a type of person/situation in their mind and then describe characteristics of the person/situation in detail (Skeem & Golding 2001; Weiner, Richmond, Seib, Rauch & Hackney, 2002). Thought-listing techniques, another approach to identifying cognitive structures (Cacciopo, vonHippel & Ernst 1997) ask respondents to list their thoughts about a real or hypothetical experience or anticipated event.…”

“…Conover and Feldman (1984) used this method to examine how people organize political beliefs and found support for both a schematic model of political beliefs and their strategy for studying schematic knowledge. Studies have applied cluster analysis (Lurigio & Carroll, 1985;Skeem & Golding,2001; Weiner, et al, 2002) and/or factor analytic techniques (Skeem & Golding, 2001; Conover & Feldman , 1984) to rated item data to identify and compare cognitive representations across groups of people. The evidence here suggests that groups of people with more shared and repeated experiences of a subculture (Harris, 1994), such as probation officers (Lurigio & Carroll, 1985), have more efficient coalescence in categories of schema than in a broader population with a more diffuse and limited experience base, such as jurors (Skeem & Golding, 2001).…”