The Unreliable Human Mind: False Memories and Biased Judgments in the Context of Legal Decision Making

Max Planck Guest Lecture

  • Date: Sep 24, 2024
  • Time: 05:00 PM - 07:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Prof. Dr. Aileen Oeberst (Chair of Media Psychology at FernUniversität in Hagen)
  • Aileen Oeberst is a professor for media psychology at the University of Hagen. She has studied psychology at the universities of Leipzig, Germany, as well as Cagliarì, Italy and then joined a Graduate School at the University of Osnabrück, Germany, where she completed her PhD with a thesis on human memory. Subsequently she worked as a PostDoc at the Leibniz Institute for Knowledge Media in Tübingen, Germany, where she also was PI of the junior research group „Collaborative Biases“ before she was then appointed to an assistant professorship for Forensic Psychology.
  • Location: Freiburg/Germany, Fürstenbergstr. 19
  • Room: Seminar room (F 113) | Guests are welcome; please register
  • Host: Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law
  • Contact: c.hillemanns@csl.mpg.de
Legal decisions are largely based on human information processing. Not only do they rely on human memory but they result from human decision-making. As much psychological research shows, however, human memory is fallible and malleable and human decision-making is often biased. I will present some relevant own work on three topics: (1) false autobiographical memories, (2) hindsight bias in judges’ negligence assessments, and (3) effects of pretrial publicity on the respective legal judgments. Finally, I will discuss the findings, derive implications and potential countermeasures.

Please register your participation with Carolin Hillemanns: c.hillemanns@csl.mpg.de.

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