Category: Crime and Crime Prevention

Security and Defence is a complex area within the EU. In spite of a long-standing history, its development and role within the EU has long remained distinct from other areas; the particular attachment of this area to state sovereignty has necessitated a cautious approach. This paper explores the recent developments in Security and Defence since…Continue Reading CSDP and the development of the ‘Global EU’: The progress of EU autonomy in the shadow of Brexit

        Eyewitness descriptions provide critical information for the police and other agencies to use during investigations. While researchers have typically considered the impact of memory, little consideration has been given to the utility of facial descriptions themselves, without the additional memory demands. In Experiment 1, participants described face images to their partners,…Continue Reading Eyewitness descriptions without memory: The (f)utility of describing faces

The use of leading questions during cross-examination can undermine the accuracy and completeness of evidence presented in court. Furthermore, increasing numbers of general witnesses are arriving in court unprepared for the experience. In this study, 60 mock witnesses from England and Wales were allocated to one of the three preparation conditions: (a) those who received…Continue Reading Directive Leading Questions and Preparation Technique Effects on Witness Accuracy

Hyper-realistic face masks have been used as disguises in at least one border crossing and in numerous criminal cases. Experimental tests using these masks have shown that viewers accept them as real faces under a range of conditions. Here, we tested mask detection in a live identity verification task. Fifty-four visitors at the London Science…Continue Reading Hyper-realistic Face Masks in a Live Passport-Checking Task

          Investigations of face identification have typically focused on matching faces to photographic IDs. Few researchers have considered the task of searching for a face in a crowd. In Experiment 1, we created the Chokepoint Search Test to simulate real‐time search for a target. Performance on this test was poor (39%…Continue Reading Searching for faces in crowd chokepoint videos

  The importance of warfare for human evolution is hotly debated in anthropology. Some authors hypothesize that warfare emerged at least 200,000–100,000 years BP, was frequent, and significantly shaped human social evolution. Other authors claim that warfare is a recent phenomenon, linked to the emergence of agriculture, and mostly explained by cultural rather than evolutionary…Continue Reading Warfare in an evolutionary perspective

Our first impressions of others, whether accurate or unfounded, have real-world consequences in terms of how we judge and treat those people. Previous research has suggested that criminal sentencing is influenced by the perceived facial trustworthiness of defendants in murder trials. In real cases, those who appeared less trustworthy were more likely to receive death…Continue Reading Facial Trustworthiness and Criminal Sentencing: A Comment on Wilson and Rule