Tennessee Tech students are getting hands-on research experience examining how human behavior can influence the justice system.
Counseling and Psychology Assistant Professor Dr. Haley Dawson said the Legal, Experimental and Applied Psychology Lab, or LEAP Lab, applies psychological research to questions throughout the legal system.
“I think often the law is very focused on maybe efficiency and trying to just solve the next problem, which is great, we need an efficient system,” Dawson said, “But I think psychology can really come in and build some of those foundational elements of human behavior.”
Dawson said students are examining subjects including witness memory and how people perceive evidence. Some of that work considers characteristics that could affect how people are viewed inside the justice system.
“We aren’t brand new humans just because we’re sitting on a jury, and so we want to make sure we’re taking into account how some of these factors might impact how a jury thinks or how a judge perceives evidence, for example,” Dawson said. “So any element that you can think of about a person probably has some sort of impact in the justice system somewhere.”
Dawson said current projects include examining how victim impact statements affect sentencing decisions and methods that could help witnesses remember information more robustly. The lab is also beginning research related to objectivity in sexual assault nursing examinations.
Dawson said students are involved throughout the research process rather than simply observing faculty research.
“I would say they play a really big role in how we actually investigate these questions by reading the research and sometimes just coming into it as a novice undergraduate researcher, sometimes they have different ideas of what might be important, and they’re all of jury age, right, they can interact with the justice system, so their perspectives really provide a lot of new information that maybe we can get into a rut sometimes as researchers,” Dawson said. “They can definitely come up with some new interesting ideas that we maybe haven’t considered before.”
Six students from the lab recently applied to present their research at a national legal psychology conference next year. Dawson said the experience is designed to prepare students to think independently about questions involving psychology and the justice system.
“Being able to just see their research brain kicking on for these students, I think is probably the biggest thing for me,” Dawson said. “If we don’t presentations are great, but being able to submit something for a journal is fantastic, but if the students are learning, that’s my main goal, I want to be able to mentor them into kind of the next phase of their lives after they graduate.”
Dawson said the lab also exposes students to career and research opportunities in legal psychology beyond more familiar roles such as detectives or criminal profilers.
