Stephanie Madon

Iowa State University | ISU · Department of Psychology

Objective: Two experiments examined the potential for inconclusive forensic decisions to disadvantage the innocent. Hypotheses: Both experiments tested the hypothesis that inconclusive decisions produce more incriminating legal judgments than do clearly exculpatory forensic decisions. Experiment 2 also examined whether this hypothesized effect conf...

This article presents key findings from a research project that evaluated the validity and probative value of cartridge-case comparisons under field-based conditions. Decisions provided by 228 trained firearm examiners across the US showed that forensic cartridge-case comparison is characterized by low error rates. However, inconclusive decisions c...

The field of psychology–law is extremely broad, encompassing a strikingly large range of topic areas in both applied psychology and experimental psychology. Despite the continued and rapid growth of the field, there is no current and comprehensive resource that provides coverage of the major topic areas in the psychology–law field. The Oxford Handb...

Objective: Black people are disproportionately targeted and disadvantaged in the criminal legal system. We tested whether Black exonerees are similarly disadvantaged by the stigma of wrongful conviction. Hypotheses: In Experiment 1, we predicted that the stigma of wrongful conviction would be greater for Black than White exonerees. After finding th...

Empathy toward one’s offender has been identified as an important variable in the forgiveness process, but elements of the empathy—forgiveness connection have yet to be explored. The current study experimentally examined both direct and indirect methods of promoting general empathy (i.e., empathy not connected specifically to the offense) toward a...

Objective: In custodial interrogations, suspects tend to give disproportionate weight to immediate outcomes relative to future outcomes when deciding whether to confess or deny guilt. The current research examined whether the perceived (un)certainty of an immediate outcome influences suspects' short-sighted confession decisions. Hypotheses: We h...

This research tested whether the perception of threat during a police interrogation mobilizes suspects to cope with interrogation demands and bolsters their resistance to self-incrimination pressures. Experimental procedures led university undergraduates (N = 296) to engage in misconduct or not, thereby making them guilty or innocent. An experiment...

Paper presented at annual meeting of the American Psychology-Law Society, Portland, OR.

An overview of empirical research related to interrogations and confessions in the criminal justice system.

A recurring theme in the psychological literature is that the self-fulfilling effect of stereotypes can accumulate across perceivers. This article provides the first empirical support for this long-standing hypothesis. In three experiments (Ns = 123-241), targets more strongly confirmed a stereotype as the number of perceivers who held stereotypic...

Although research has given substantial attention to understanding the antecedents of dispositional inferences, less attention has been directed at the consequences of these inferences, such that evidence linking dispositional inferences to downstream effects is relatively scarce. The present investigation examined whether dispositional inferences...

This research examined whether criminal stereotypes—i.e., beliefs about the typical characteristics of crime perpetrators—influence mock jurors’ judgments of guilt in cases involving confession evidence. Mock jurors (N = 450) read a trial transcript that manipulated whether a defendant’s ethnicity was stereotypic or counterstereotypic of a crime, a...

This study tested whether high counseling self-efficacy was associated with less physiologic stress for student helpers facing difficult helping situations. A total of 225 students completed a counseling self-efficacy measure before providing supportive help. During this time, participants’ blood pressure and heart rate were evaluated. Between the...

Every day, thousands of defendants, prosecutors, and defense attorneys must make guilty plea decisions, such as whether to accept a plea offer or proceed to trial. Most defendants opt to plead guilty; approximately 95% of state and federal convictions result from guilty pleas. In light of a newly emerging body of research and recent Supreme Court d...

One reason people falsely confess is to protect the true perpetrator. The current study examined whether relationship closeness influences people's self-reported willingness to falsely take the blame. Utilizing theoretical work from the prosocial area, three potential mediators were investigated. Participants (N = 131) were randomly assigned to thi...

We conducted two experiments to test whether police interrogation elicits a biphasic process of resistance from suspects. According to this process, the initial threat of police interrogation mobilizes suspects to resist interrogative influence in a manner akin to a fight or flight response, but suspects’ protracted self-regulation of their behavio...

This article presents a new model of confessions referred to as the interrogation decision-making model. This model provides a theoretical umbrella with which to understand and analyze suspects’ decisions to deny or confess guilt in the context of a custodial interrogation. The model draws upon expected utility theory to propose a mathematical acco...

This research provided the first empirical test of the hypothesis that stereotypes bias evaluations of forensic evidence. A pilot study (N = 107) assessed the content and consensus of 20 criminal stereotypes by identifying perpetrator characteristics (e.g., sex, race, age, religion) that are stereotypically associated with specific crimes. In the m...

Taking blame for another person's misconduct may occur at relatively high rates for less serious crimes. The authors examined individual differences and situational factors related to this phenomenon by surveying college students (n = 213) and men enrolled in substance abuse treatment programs (n = 42). Among college students, conscientiousness and...

Objective: This study tested the relationship between popularity and early adolescent alcohol use and examined whether popularity moderated the influence of several risk processes. Method: Longitudinal data provided by 1,196 youth (590 girls) were analyzed to assess main and interactive effects of popularity, friends' alcohol use attitudes, own...

Suspects have a propensity to focus on short-term contingencies, giving disproportionate weight to the proximal consequences that are delivered by police during an interrogation, and too little consideration to the distal (and often more severe) consequences that may be levied by the judicial system if they are convicted. In this research, the auth...

a b s t r a c t Grandiosity and vulnerability are distinct dimensions of narcissism, but little research has examined their differences regarding prosocial behavior. This investigation is the first to test the hypotheses that gran-diose narcissism predicts withholding help under high social pressure, whereas vulnerable narcissism predicts withholdi...

This research examined whether naturally-occurring self-fulfilling prophecies influenced adolescents' responsiveness to a substance use prevention program. The authors addressed this issue with a unique methodological approach that was designed to enhance the internal validity of research on naturally-occurring self-fulfilling prophecies by experim...

Psychotherapy may be underutilized because people experience self-stigma-the internalization of public stigma associated with seeking psychotherapy. The purpose of this study was to experimentally test whether the self-stigma associated with seeking psychotherapy could be reduced by a self-affirmation intervention wherein participants reflected on...

Innocent suspects may not adequately protect themselves during interrogation because they fail to fully appreciate the danger of the situation. This experiment tested whether innocent suspects experience less stress during interrogation than guilty suspects, and whether refusing to confess expends physiologic resources. After experimentally manipul...

This research examined whether the protections afforded by Miranda are compromised by two situational factors that may be present during the Miranda administration process. The factors examined were the police tactic of trivializing the importance of a waiver and the stress that accompanies an accusation of serious misconduct. All participants (N =...

Suspects have a preexisting vulnerability to make short-sighted confession decisions, giving disproportionate weight to proximal, rather than distal, consequences. The findings of the current research provided evidence that this preexisting vulnerability is exacerbated by factors that are associated with the immediate interrogation situation. In Ex...

This research examined whether self‐fulfilling prophecies and perceptual confirmation effects accumulated across people. Trios of same‐sex participants, each consisting of two interviewers and one target, were randomly assigned to one of three conditions that served to manipulate interviewers' expectations (i.e., non‐hostile vs. hostile) and the si...

A core theme of social psychology is that perceivers can shape targets’ future behaviors through self-fulfilling prophecies. Self-fulfilling prophecies occur when perceivers’ false beliefs about targets initiate a sequence of events that ultimately cause targets to exhibit expectancy-consistent behaviors, thereby causing perceivers’ initially false...

Researchers have suggested that one function of touch in mixed-sex interac-tions is to exert influence over another person. Yet theories offer different explanations as to when women and men will use touch as an influence strategy. The gender politics hypothesis proposes that men touch more as a way to maintain inequalities present in society. In t...

Miranda v. Arizona (384 U.S. 436, 1966) required that suspects be explicitly warned of the right to avoid self-incrimination and the right to legal representation. This research was designed to examine whether stress, induced via an accusation of wrong-doing, undermined or enhanced suspects' ability to comprehend their Miranda rights. Participants...

implicit inversion theory suggests that stereotypes about gay men include beliefs that they possess certain mental health traits more characteristic of women than men. however, no research has explored gay men's stereotype about their own mental health or how their self-stereotype relates to stereotypes of women (i.e., heterosexual women and lesbia...

Drawing on the psychological principle that proximal consequences influence behavior more strongly than distal consequences, the authors tested the hypothesis that criminal suspects exhibit a short-sightedness during police interrogation that increases their risk for confession. Consistent with this hypothesis, Experiment 1 showed that participants...

This article introduces the political person perception model, which identifies conditions under which perceivers rely on stereotypes (party membership), individuating information (issue position), or both in political person perception. Three studies supported the model's predictions. Study 1 showed that perceivers gave primacy to target informati...

This research examined whether self-verification acts as a general mediational process of self-fulfilling prophecies. The authors tested this hypothesis by examining whether self-verification processes mediated self-fulfilling prophecy effects within a different context and with a different belief and a different outcome than has been used in prior...

Acculturation and ethnic identity may be associated with Latino/as’ educational outcomes and be relevant to their lower levels of academic achievement. This article explores how these relationships might be mediated by considering several empirically supported and theory-based social psychological processes—the self-fulfilling prophecy, stigma cons...

This research examined whether self-fulfilling prophecy effects are mediated by self-verification, informational conformity, and modeling processes. The authors examined these mediational processes across multiple time frames with longitudinal data obtained from two samples of mother-child dyads (N-sub-1 = 486; N-sub-2 = 287), with children's alcoh...

This research examined two issues relevant to self-fulfilling prophecies. First, it examined whether children's risk for alcohol use, as indicated by their self-efficacy to refuse alcohol from peers, moderated their susceptibility to negative and positive self-fulfilling prophecy effects created by their mothers. Second, it explored behavioral medi...

This research includes two experiments that examined (a) whether the assessment situation in which individuals complete an implicit measure of bias alters their responses and (b) whether the hypothesized effect of the assessment situation on implicitly assessed bias reflects socially desirable responding. Participants in Experiment 1 (N = 151) comp...

This research examines whether social norms regarding a stigma's protection from prejudice differentially affect explicit and implicit threat reactions to the stigmatized, and the degree to which such differences can be accounted for by socially desirable responding, internalized egalitarian values, and dual attitudes about stigmatized individuals....

This research examined whether self-fulfilling prophecy effects accumulated, dissipated, or remained stable over time in terms of 2 complementary conceptual models. Analyses of longitudinal data from 2 samples of mother-child dyads (N(1) = 487; N(2) = 288) yielded 3 main findings. First, the degree to which mothers' inaccurate beliefs assessed at a...

This research examines how attention and accuracy motivation moderate stereotyping in person perception. Hypotheses were derived from the stereotype validity model, which proposes that perceivers are more likely to use a stereotype as the basis of their impressions when they believe that the generalized beliefs contained within it are valid for the...

Three studies were conducted to examine the mental health stereotypes about gay men among college student and therapist trainee samples. Results from Study 1 indicated that (a) college students and therapist trainees endorsed a stereotype of the mental health of gay men that was similar in terms of its content and strength, and (b) the stereotype w...

The purpose of the current study was to investigate the influence of externalizing behaviors on substance initiation trajectories among rural adolescents over a 42-month period. Data were obtained from 198 rural adolescents (105 boys, 93 girls) who were participating in a longitudinal study. At the baseline assessment, subjects were on average 12.3...

This research examined whether mothers' and fathers' beliefs about their children's alcohol use had cumulative self-fulfilling effects on their children's future drinking behavior. Analyses of longitudinal data acquired from 115 seventh-grade children and their mothers and fathers were consistent with synergistic accumulation effects for negative b...

Hostile individuals' negative evaluations of and anger toward others could result from information- processing biases associated with encoding, memory, or both. Further, these biases may stem from a hostile person's motivation to protect the self and may therefore be strongest under conditions of self-directed threat. In this research, we examined...

This research examined whether parents' and children's perceptions of one another have reciprocal self-fulfilling effects on each other's behavior. Parents and their adolescent children completed self-report surveys and engaged in dyadic videotaped interaction tasks. The surveys assessed mothers', fathers', and children's perceptions of their own a...

This research examined whether mothers' expectations about their children's drinking behavior influenced their children's future alcohol use through self-fulfilling prophecies. It also investigated whether children's self-esteem, family social class, or the valence of mother expectations moderated this process. Analyses of longitudinal data from 50...

In this research we examined whether emotional vulnerability leads women and men to confirm gender stereotypes. Emotional vulnerability is a state where one is open to having one's feelings hurt or to experiencing rejection. Drawing on the tenets of social role theory and research related to normative expectations, we propose that emotional vulnera...

This study examined the limits of information processing biases associated with trait hostility. Ninety-eight participants processed information to evaluate its descriptiveness of themselves, and of actual antagonists and friends whom they knew well. For both self- and other-referent information, dependent measures included evaluations, response la...

This research investigated the extent to which self-fulfilling prophecies and self-verification occurred among 108 teachers and 1,692 students in 108 sixth-grade public school math classrooms. Results demonstrated three main findings. Self-fulfilling prophecies and self-verification occurred simultaneously in a context where perceivers and targets...

Three studies assessed changes in the content, consensus, and favorableness of 10 ethnic and national stereotypes by replicating and extending the Princeton trilogy. Results indicated that throughout the past 60 years, almost all of the ethnic and national stereotypes that were examined had changed in content, and more than half had changed in cons...

Comments on the article by Sue (December 1999; see record 1999-15532-003), in which he leveled a serious charge against the scientific community of psychology. He asserted that the enforcement of scientific criteria is selective and biased against ethnicity research. To remedy this bias, Sue proposed that the field adopt an exceptionally strong fo...

This research examined the accuracy and power of sex, social class, and ethnic stereotypes in person perception. Participants included 49 to 56 teachers and nearly 2,000 students in seventh-grade public school math classes. Results indicated that teacher perceptions regarding achievement and motivation differences between girls and boys, lower- and...

We examined ability grouping as a moderator of self-fulfilling prophecies in two ways. First, we examined ability group moderation for individual students with data from 1701 students and 97 teachers from sixth-grade math classes. Second, we examined ability group moderation at the class level with data from 108 sixth-grade math classes. Across bot...

The current research examined the content and strength of the gay male stereotype. This focus represents a return to the earliest issues addressed by social psychologists. Although once a major substantive area in social psychology, issues of content gradually gave way to issues of process. However, issues of content and process are inextricably ti...

This research examined moderators of naturally occurring self-fulfilling prophecies. The authors assessed whether positive or negative self-fulfilling prophecies were more powerful and whether some targets were more susceptible to self-fulfilling prophecies because of their self-concepts in a particular achievement domain and previous academic reco...

This chapter provides an overview of research on accuracy, error, bias, and self-fulfilling prophecies. It also reviews a research showing that teacher expectations predict student achievement—mainly because they are accurate, although they do lead to small self-fulfilling prophecies and biases. The conditions under which self-fulfilling prophecies...

How are teacher expectations related to student achievement? Social psychology has long emphasized the power of social beliefs to create reality (see Jussim [1991] for a review). According to such perspectives, for example, children become what significant others, such as parents and teachers, expect them to become. But are children so malleable th...

identify 3 different reasons why students may confirm teachers' expectations / review research documenting the existence of self-fulfilling prophecies, perceptual biases, and accuracy in the classroom / describe the processes by which teacher expectations may become self-fulfilling / identify factors that may increase or decrease expectancy effects...