Jurors in Criminal Trials Often Fail to Fully Discount Coerced

question 134

Multiple Choice

Jurors in criminal trials often fail to fully discount coerced confessions. In what sense can the fundamental attribution error explain this tendency?

• A) People often overlook the situational factors that lead others to commit criminal acts.
• B) We tend to think that no situational influences could be strong enough to lead someone to confess to something they did not do.
• C) Jurors usually think that false confessions result from certain personality characteristics, such as passivity or lack of education.
• D) Few people think that they themselves would ever admit to a crime they did not commit.

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Definitions:

Encode

To convert information or an idea into a particular form, often for communication or processing.

Stereotypes

Widely held but fixed and oversimplified images or ideas of a particular type of person or thing, often used to generalize about groups of people.

Associative Networks

A model in psychology that explains how thoughts and memories are interconnected through associations.

Content-Free Schemas

Mental structures that organize general concepts or strategies rather than specific information or content.