Professor Michelle McCauley delves into the mysterious world of legal psychology.
By Tim Johnson
In the summer of 1988, an employee at a New Jersey day-care center was found guilty of sexually abusing children in her care and sentenced to 47 years in prison. Five years later, however, a state appeals court overturned the conviction of the former teacher, Kelly Michaels, deeming the damning statements made by her accusers—children ranging from three to four years old—unreliable. "If a child's recollection of events has been molded by an interrogation, that influence undermines the reliability of the child's responses as an accurate recollection of actual events," the court stated in its opinion.
Michaels's ordeal is one of several widely publicized cases in which the accused was convicted but later exculpated after the interviews of child witnesses were reexamined—and it's exactly the type of case that has fueled the professional passions of psychology chair Michelle McCauley.
The mother of two children, McCauley stumbled upon this niche in the psychology field nearly a decade ago, when a friend's family became embroiled in accusations of child sexual abuse. "It was very unclear what had happened," McCauley recalls. "The parents made allegations of abuse, but there was no physical evidence." The family was torn apart, McCauley says, in part as a result of statements elicited from the purported victim—interviewed at age two. That case, along with the experiences of a clinical psychologist friend, nudged McCauley, who was working in finance, to earn an advanced degree in psychology. And while she could have pursued any number of avenues—behavioral or cognitive psych, for instance—she kept returning to applied psychology and the role of children in the legal system.
How does one know whether a child's statements reflect what really happened? How does one interview a child to elicit the truth without implanting the interrogator's suspicion? And how is a jury likely to assess the credibility of a child's testimony? These are all questions McCauley has faced as a researcher and poses to her students in the classroom.
While a graduate student at Florida International University, McCauley had the good fortune to land Ronald Fisher as a mentor. A co-developer of the questioning technique called the cognitive interview, Fisher devised an interview process that encourages the interviewee to reconstruct the context of an alleged crime, to report everything that happened, and then to go over the events in reverse, or from different points of view. The questions are open-ended, and the interruptions—in contrast to standard police interviewing techniques—are kept to a minimum.
Indeed, research has found that the cognitive interview elicits more information that is accurate than the standard interview. However, in conducting her master's research project—an experiment in which 86 second-graders participated in a "Simon Says" game, after which they were twice interviewed using alternative techniques—McCauley discovered that the overall proportions of accuracy and inaccuracy are about the same, so the cognitive interview also brings out a greater number of details that are inaccurate. ("Facilitating Children's Eyewitness Recall with the Revised Cognitive Interview" was published in the Journal of Applied Psychology in August 1995.)
McCauley points out that any effort to design an optimal interviewing technique must draw on a large body of research that explores many variables—the nature of the crime, the age of the inter- viewee, the amount of time elapsed, and so on. Some of her recent research has focused on the credibility of child victims: a 2001 study found that jurors in simulated trials perceived children as much more credible in a sexual-assault case than in a robbery case.
Research of this sort is of considerable interest to prosecutors and defense lawyers; trial consulting is a burgeoning field for psychologists these days. But McCauley, who did some consulting work while she was a student, has eschewed the practice since she's been at Middlebury. Consulting, she believes, would impede what she loves most: teaching and research.
Students have become increasingly interested in legal psychology—particularly since the 1995 O. J. Simpson murder trial, which introduced the phenomenon of jury consulting to the public. McCauley was job hunting in '95, and when she was invited to interview at Middlebury, she arrived on campus at a fortuitous time. The vacancy in the psychology department was for a position in applied psychology, and there was keen student interest in a specific applied specialty that year: legal psychology.
"I recall being especially impressed by Michelle's breadth of knowledge in psychology," says Associate Professor Carlos Velez-Blasini, who was on the search committee. "Her training was very comprehensive, and from looking at her application, we knew she could teach courses in a number of areas outside of legal psychology." But it may have been her legal psychology background that gave her an edge and ultimately led to her appointment.
McCauley was promoted to associate professor two years ago, and in July she became chair of the department. She relishes teaching, and she's impressed by the caliber of Middlebury students, many of whom conduct research that's of master's quality. Her courses include legal psychology, the psychology of work, but she's fondest of her course Research Methods, which draws about 30 majors.
"I'm trying to get [my students] to change the way they see the world," she says. "None of us can afford to approach the world in a simplistic manner, in which we either accept or dismiss research without considering its strengths and weaknesses. I hope that my students will leave Research Methods with the tools to be able to critically evaluate the design of a study and judge whether they have enough information to make a decision about the quality of the study, or if not, what else they would need to know to do so."
In nurturing these critical-thinking skills, McCauley is also preparing Middlebury students for careers in a field of critical importance.
"I credit my research methods experience as the starting point for my interest in law," says Margaret Aleks '03, a first-year student at the University of California Law School.
"I had Professor McCauley for legal psychology, and like other courses she teaches, she focused not on the 'ivory tower' and research purely for the pursuit of knowledge," Aleks says. "She's focused on research that is applicable to everyday situations that can be used to improve aspects of our social systems, in this case the legal system."
Tim Johnson is a freelance writer in Burlington, Vt.