title: The psychology of telling murder stories: do we think in scripts, exemplars, or prototypes?
abstract: According to the story model of Pennington and Hastie, jurors collect information at trial and modify it with general knowledge to create case stories. Schank and Ableson argue that human memory is organized to tell and understand stories. However, Finkel and Groscup questioned the use of manipulated, experimenter-constructed narratives to demonstrate the existence of multiple prototypical crime stories. We interviewed 76 jury eligible, death qualified citizens and asked them to imagine a first-degree murder scenario, describing the events that led to the killing. We coded the presence of dichotomous variables in the resulting stories and identified at least three shared story prototypes using cluster and profile analysis. We conclude that people do not store crime stories as simple prototypes and comment on the implications of this finding for legal decision-making.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Baruch College, City University of New York, 1 Bernard Baruch Way, 8-215, New York, NY 10010, USA. Richard_Wiener@baruch.cuny.edu
authors.forename: Richard L
authors.initials: RL
authors.lastname: Wiener
authors.forename: Tracey L
authors.initials: TL
authors.lastname: Richmond
authors.forename: Hope M
authors.initials: HM
authors.lastname: Seib
authors.forename: Shannon M
authors.initials: SM
authors.lastname: Rauch
authors.forename: Amy A
authors.initials: AA
authors.lastname: Hackney
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D016000:Cluster Analysis; D005260:Female; D006708:Homicide; D006801:Humans; D007092:Imagination; D007603:Jurisprudence; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory; D008923:Missouri; D012961:Sociology