Shari R Berkowitz

California State University, Dominguez Hills | CSUDH · College of Business Administration and Public Policy

Significance False confessions occur surprisingly frequently in the context of interrogations and criminal investigations. Indeed, false confessions are thought to account for approximately 15–25% of wrongful convictions in the United States. Here we demonstrate that sleep deprivation increases the likelihood that a person will falsely confess to w...

In January 2012, the United States Supreme Court ruled that suggestive identification procedures violate a defendant's rights to due process only if law enforcement officials orchestrated the suggestive procedures. The Court's decision in Perry v. New Hampshire (Perry v. New Hampshire, No. 10–8974, 565 U.S. ___, 2012) dealt a serious blow to schola...

We exposed college students to suggestive materials in order to lead them to believe that, as children, they had a negative experience at Disneyland involving the Pluto character. A sizable minority of subjects developed a false belief or memory that Pluto had uncomfortably licked their ear. Suggestions about a positive experience with Pluto led to...

Wixted et al. (in press Wixted, J. T., Mickes, L., Brewin, C. R., & Andrews, B. (in press). Doing right by the eyewitness evidence: A response to Berkowitz et al. Memory.[Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]. Doing right by the eyewitness evidence: A response to Berkowitz et al. Memory) remind us that they are aware of some conditions in which conf...

Eyewitness memory researchers have recently devoted considerable attention to eyewitness confidence. While there is strong consensus that courtroom confidence is problematic, we now recognise that an eyewitness’s initial confidence in their first identification – in certain contexts – can be of value. A few psychological scientists, however, have c...

In the current issue, Wixted, Mickes, and Fisher make the claim that eyewitness memory is not inherently unreliable. They also describe specific conditions under which an eyewitness’s confidence can be a reliable indicator of accuracy in the context of both recall and recognition. We argue, however, that calculating the probative value of eyewitnes...

For many decades eyewitness-memory researchers have testified as expert witnesses in legal cases. Although eyewitness-memory experts may testify to the myriad factors that can influence and distort an eyewitness's memory, one crucial factor that can contaminate an eyewitness's memory is misinformation. This chapter provides a review of the scientif...

Researchers have proposed that planting false memories could have positive behavioral consequences. The idea of deceptively planting 'beneficial' false memories outside of the laboratory raises important ethical questions, but how might the general public appraise this moral dilemma? In two studies, participants from the USA and UK read about a fic...

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When people take drugs such as propranolol in response to trauma, it may dampen their bad memories – tempering recall of a traumatic event. We examined people's attitudes toward these drugs. Americans and New Zealanders read about a hypothetical assault inserting themselves into a scenario as a victim attacked while serving on a peace keeping missi...

Faulty eyewitness testimony is the leading cause of wrongful convictions. To understand how mistakes can happen, it is important to study the processes involved when witnesses see a crime, report it to the police, and testify at trial. Psychologists have identified three stages of witness memory—acquisition, retention, and retrieval—and various fac...

In past research, we planted false memories for food related childhood events using a simple false feedback procedure. Some critics have worried that our findings may be due to demand characteristics. In the present studies, we developed a novel procedure designed to reduce the influence of demand characteristics by providing an alternate magnet fo...