TY  - JOUR
PY  - 2016//
TI  - Attribution of crime motives biases eyewitnesses' memory and sentencing decisions
JO  - Psychology, crime and law
A1  - Hellmann, Deborah F.
A1  - Memon, Amina
SP  - 957
EP  - 976
VL  - 22
IS  - 10
N2  - In court, the basic expectation is that eyewitness accounts are solely based on what the witness saw. Research on post-event influences has shown that this is not always the case and memory distortions are quite common. However, potential effects of an eyewitness' attributions regarding a perpetrator's crime motives have been widely neglected in this domain. In this paper, we present two experiments (N = 209) in which eyewitnesses were led to conclude that a perpetrator's motives for a crime were either dispositional or situational. As expected, misinformation consistent with an eyewitness' attribution of crime motives was typically falsely recognised as true whereas inconsistent misinformation was correctly rejected. Furthermore, a dispositional vs. situational attribution of crime motives resulted in more severe (mock) sentencing supporting previous research. The findings are discussed in the context of schema-consistent biases and the effect of attributions about character in a legal setting.<p />  <p>Language: en</p>
LA  - en
SN  - 1068-316X
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1068316X.2016.1207768
ID  - ref1
ER  -