Personally, I think this was (and will be) the most enjoyable of the warm up exercises this semester. First, because finding people online is a skill I hone at my internship, and second, because knowing who wrote a text and where they come from is just as important as the text's content. Also, the people I researched were surprisingly interesting - one of the authors I wrote about, Dr. Scott O. Lilienfeld, studies pseudoscience and wrote a book on 50 of the most popular psychological myths (So subconscious priming in ads? Myth.)
Did I mention how much I enjoy stalking - I mean, finding information on people online?
In my search, I read an interesting trade journal article about a phenomenon known as the cross-race identification effect. Briefly, there are differences in the way Anglo and African American eyewitnesses view photo lineups. Using eye-tracking technology, Josephson & Holmes (2013) found that Anglo eyewitnesses making identifications of an Anglo suspect were more confident and accurate; in contrast, African American eyewitnesses viewing photo lineups of African Americans tended to exhibit "cautious confirmation" (p. 247) and spent more time focusing on the photos. In addition, the researchers detected the existence of a cross-race recognition deficit. Basically, more successful identifications were made when eyewitnesses saw same-race photo lineups, and made more incorrect identifications with cross-race photo lineups. This effect is one of the reasons eyewitness identification, especially in cross-race situations, can be unreliable.
- The Lexis Nexis database has a "people search (first and last name)" function. I have yet to try this out, but no doubt it will come in handy for my future annotations.
- After doing a Google search of databases for law/criminology journals, I ended up at a university website listing a few, namely Criminal Justice Articles and Political Science Complete.
- I tossed out a few of my sources this week, because they were written by people whom I thought were not the most knowledgeable to write on the topic. I ended up with articles written by a good pool of psychology professors, philosophy professors, and attorneys.
Also, if you haven't used Evernote before, try it and you will be amazed at how much more efficient you become. I have it installed as a Google Chrome (a great browser!) extension, making it easy to simply "snip" portions of or whole web pages, title, and tag them for later review. Such an organized way to save time.
That's all for now - stay tuned for my next blog post about our Strengths and Weaknesses analysis warm up.
Photo Credit:
http://i1187.photobucket.com/albums/z390/griseomitran/01_zps027d686c.jpg