Do Evaluators Think About Alibi Stories Differently Than Everyday Stories?

1. Do Evaluators Think About Alibi Stories Differently Than Everyday Stories? Elizabeth A. Olson University of Wisconsin-Whitewater

2. Overview • Olson & Wells (2004): • Empirical and conceptual work on alibis • Continuation of this work: • Alibi skepticism hypothesis • Speaks to the psychology of belief and disbelief

3. Overview • How do people process alibis? • Does the concept of alibi influence subsequent processing of the alibi? • How do they evaluate alibis? • Are evaluators more skeptical of alibis than of other narrative accounts?

4. Two ways to answer these questions… • Do people remember more alibi-relevant information when they know it’s an alibi? • Are people more skeptical of an alibi story? • Do they scrutinize an alibi narrative more than an everyday narrative? • How do people with limited processing resources evaluate alibis — are they more or less believing?

5. Experiment 1:Using Memory to Infer How Evaluators Process Alibis • Do people process alibis differently than other narrative information? • Used recall as a way to discover processing differences

6. Experiment 1:Using Memory to Infer How Evaluators Process Alibis • 285 participants • Alibi video • 4 independent raters parsed the script into idea units (smallest units of speech that convey a complete idea) • Idea units corresponded to three time-frames of the story: 11:00-12:00, 12:00-1:00, 1:00-2:00 • Idea units from the critical time block: 40%

7. Design: Experiment 1

8. Total recall 12-1 Overall recall score Experiment 1:Using Memory to Infer How Evaluators Process Alibis • Primary Dependent Measure: • Participants asked to recall the alibi story • 2 independent raters scored each recall paragraph • Total recall score: Perfect recall weighted more heavily than gist recall • Scores generated for each time frame • Critical Time Period Bias measure:

9. Experiment 1: Critical time bias score

10. Experiment 1: MC Memory Test

11. Experiment 1: Belief ratings

12. Experiment 1: Conclusions • Participants’ knowledge that they were watching an alibi affected encoding, but not retrieval, of the alibi story • An active alibi schema could produce selective encoding effects • Time markers • Location markers

13. Overall Conclusions • Evaluators process alibis differently from everyday narrative accounts • Alibi Skepticism • Intuitively satisfying • Perhaps not as robust as first thought