Psychology and Law, Meet Open Science

As the field of psychology and law begins to embrace more transparent and accessible science, many questions arise about what open science actually is and how to do it. In this chapter, we contextualize this reform by examining fundamental concerns about psychological research—irreproducibility and replication failures, false-positive errors, and questionable research practices—that threaten its validity and credibility. Next, we turn to psychology’s response by reviewing the concept of open science and explaining how to implement specific practices—preregistration, registered reports, open materials/data/code, and open access publishing—designed to make research more transparent and accessible. We conclude by weighing the implications of open science for the field of psychology and law, specifically with respect to how we conduct and evaluate research, as well as how we train the next generation of psychological scientists and share scientific findings in applied settings.

Overview of the Research

Chapter 3 begins with an overview of the law in Pennsylvania regarding economic sanctions. It then provides an overview of the research that my students and I conducted in Pennsylvania, research that combines perspectives from criminology, psychology, and law. It also discusses the need for and use of multiple research methods and multiple levels of analyses in addressing issues that affect public policy. The rationale for this multiplistic approach is that consistent findings across studies, despite the different strengths and weaknesses of the different methods, indicate that those findings are probably valid. The research used state-wide data from courts, data from individual counties for both adult and juvenile offenders, and surveys of victims, offenders, and judges. The chapter then discusses three studies of economic sanctions based on statewide data or on data from multiple counties, which together provide broad descriptive information about how economic sanctions are handled in different parts of the state.

No Small Matter

For many centuries Jews were renowned for the efforts they put into their children's welfare and education. Eventually, prioritizing children became a modern Western norm, as reflected in an abundance of research in fields such as pediatric medicine, psychology, and law. In other academic fields, however, young children in particular have received less attention, perhaps because they rarely leave written documentation. The interdisciplinary symposium in this volume seeks to overcome this challenge by delving into different facets of Jewish childhood in history, literature, and film. The book visits five continents and studies Jewish children from the 19th century until the present. It includes chapters on the demographic patterns of Jewish reproduction; on the evolution of bar and bat mitzvah ceremonies; on the role children played in the project of Hebrew revival; on their immigrant experiences in the United States; on novels for young Jewish readers written in Hebrew and Yiddish; and on Jewish themes in films featuring children. Several chapters focus on child Holocaust survivors or the children of survivors in a variety of settings ranging from Europe, North Africa, and Israel to the summer bungalow colonies of the Catskill Mountains. In addition to the symposium, this volume also features chapters on a transformative Yiddish poem by a Soviet Jewish author and on the cultural legacy of Lenny Bruce.

Cyber-Security Culture: Psychological and Legal Aspects

Digitalization has become part and parcel of the modern-day human activities. Nowadays it is going into every field of business and personal life. To develop and prosper, most organizations need IT systems, and hence to take the safeguarding of their informational assets seriously. Many of the processes which are essential for securing their IT assets, largely depend on human interaction. This study has attempted to address the culture of cyber-security in the light of psychology and law. The results of the research showed that from the psychological standpoint, the culture of cyber-security involves the willingness on the part of a modern human to overcome the digital expansion by mastering the tools for countering the negative IT factors. In its turn, from the legal standpoint, the culture of cyber-security is based on the legislative framework which regulates the legal relations in the field of cyber-security.

Interest and Need: Critical Look at their Identification in Russian Law

Based on a critical analysis of the doctrinal definitions of the concept of "interest" in sociology, psychology, and law, it is concluded that the prevailing point of view in modern Russian legal theory, i.e. "interest is a conscious need to satisfy a need", is wrongly absolutized. Excessive psychologization of modern legal definitions of interest leads to a direct identification of interests with needs, puts an equal sign between these far from close concepts. It is shown that the widespread use of psychological terminology in legal definitions of interest (In particular, the terms "awareness" and "comprehension"), does not bring any "freshness" in legal knowledge about interests. The vast majority of phenomena, objects, and events in everyday and scientific speech are not considered to be conscious, since the awareness of these phenomena is self-evident. The doctrinal definitions of interests that exist in legal science and highlight their "awareness" as the main feature are practically unsuitable for law enforcement. The author substantiates the conclusion that the widely used legal concept of "interest" needs to be freed from the excessive psychologization of its many meanings, which will, in turn, free itself from the understanding of a conscious need as the only reason for the emergence of interest. It is suggested that the definition of "interest" should be formulated not on specific types or often synonymous meanings of this concept, but on generalizations of a higher order — such as could organically include all currently existing definitions of interest. Only universals can do this. And such a universal is the concept of "well-being".

All Bullshit and Lies?

In a post-factual world in which claims are often held to be true only to the extent that they partisanly confirm one’s preexisting beliefs, this book asks the following crucial questions: How can one identify the many forms of untruthfulness in discourse? How can one know when their use is ethically wrong? How can one judge untruthfulness in the messiness of situated discourse? Drawing on pragmatics, philosophy, psychology, and law, All Bullshit and Lies? develops a comprehensive framework for analyzing untruthful discourse in situated context. The TRUST (Trust-Related Untruthfulness in Situated Text) framework sees untruthfulness as encompassing not just deliberate manipulations of what you believe to be the truth (the insincerity of withholding, misleading, and lying), but also the distortions that arise pathologically from an irresponsible attitude toward the truth (dogma, distortion, and bullshit). Truth is often not “in play” (as in jokes or fiction), or concealing it can achieve a greater good (as in saving another’s face). Untruthfulness becomes unethical in discourse, though, when it unjustifiably breaches the trust an interlocutor invests in the speaker. In such cases, the speaker becomes willfully insincere or epistemically negligent and thus culpable to a greater or lesser degree. In addition to the theoretical framework, the book provides a clear, practical heuristic for analyzing discursive untruthfulness and applies it to such cases of public discourse as the Brexit “battle bus,” Trump’s tweet about voter fraud, Blair’s and Bush’s claims about weapons of mass destruction, and the multiple forms of untruthfulness associated with the Skripal poisoning case.