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

Max-Planck-Gastvortrag:

Vortragende: Prof. Dr. Aileen Oeberst ( (Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Potsdam)

Aileen Oeberst is a professor of social psychology at the University of Potsdam. Before that she was 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.

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.

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