Mansour, Jamal
- Phone
- (403) 329-2077
- jamal.mansour@uleth.ca
Biography
I began my academic career at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada where I completed a BA (Criminology) in 2001 followed by a BSc in Psychology (Honours). I went on to work with Dr. Rod Lindsay and Dr. Kevin Munhall at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, earning my MA in Social Psychology in 2006 and my PhD in Brain, Behavior, and Cognitive Science in 2010. My first academic position was as a Limited Term Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada from 2010 to 2013. After that I travelled to Edinburgh, Scotland where I worked as a Lecturer and then Senior Lecture in Psychology at Queen Margaret University until 2022. Since January 2022, I have been an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Lethbridge.
Research Interests
If someone showed you a picture of your mother and asked who was pictured, you would probably say "my mother." This decision would be almost automatic; but why is that? What if the picture showed your mother when she was eight years old? Would the decision still be automatic? What if you had to pick your mother out of a set of six pictures? What if it was a police officer you were speaking with and he was asking you to pick a criminal out of a lineup? Decision making underlies much of our behaviour and the impact of those decisions varies from negligible to changing lives. Much of my research concerns applied decision making, and more specifically concerns how people make decisions about faces. Most of my research focuses on how people make decisions about police lineups (i.e., eyewitness identification) but I also do a bit of research on basic face recognition issues and in other experimental forensic psychology areas.
Police Lineups
Eyewitness memory refers to memory for a criminal event. When someone witnesses a crime, the police often ask them to describe the criminal, and then they search for a suspect. Once a suspect is found, witnesses are often asked to view police lineups. Criminal investigations and convictions rely heavily on eyewitness testimony in court. In particular, the conviction of a perpetrator may depend on whether a witness selects the suspect from a police lineup. This decision includes whether to identify anyone at all, the choice of a particular person, and the confidence associated with these decisions. I am interested in how this decision process occurs and the factors that influence the decision process.
I am particularly interested in the strategies that people use when viewing a lineup. Research in my lab is using eye tracking, thinking aloud (i.e., reporting your thoughts as they occur), and questionnaires to study how people make lineup decisions. I hope this research will help us better understand the decision process—allowing us to develop better theories of how eyewitnesses make lineup decisions—provide insights into how we can refine lineup procedures and instructions in order to maximize identification accuracy, and to obtain valid indicators of the likelihood that a lineup identification is accurate. Other research in my lab concerns how the decision to identify someone from a lineup varies under different circumstances, such as when the criminal was wearing a disguise at the time of the crime or had a tattoo, or when the lineup members were presented one at a time (simultaneous) versus all at once (sequentially). Finally, I am interested in what makes lineups fair and how we can measure this. A fair lineup is one in which the witness must rely on their memory a criminal rather than inferring who the police suspect because that person stands out in some way. If a lineup is unfair, then the chances of an innocent person being identified increase, which increases the possibility of a miscarriage of justice in the form of a wrongful conviction. Eyewitness evidence is highly compelling so it is very important that the police use fair lineups.
Eyewitness Confidence
The criminal justice system must make decisions about whether eyewitnesses are reliable or not. Commonly, an eyewitness' confidence is the mostly strongly relied on cue. Research shows that confidence is strongly related to accuracy under certain, ideal conditions, but we are still learning about when confidence predicts identification accuracy, which is an issue my lab is exploring. My lab is also exploring ways to maximize the relationship between confidence and accuracy. For example, most of the research on confidence has measured confidence on a scale (e.g., 0-100%, 1-7) but in practice, the police generally ask eyewitnesses to express their confidence in their own words. We are examining ways to help that the criminal justice system interpret verbal expressions of confidence.
The Weapon Focus Effect
The Weapon Focus Effect refers to findings that witnesses have poorer eyewitness memories when they witness events involving a weapon than when they witness events not involving a weapon. Witnesses may focus on a weapon to the exclusion of other items such as the face of a perpetrator or other witnesses. However, there is little research on the boundary conditions for this effect: what circumstances strengthen or weaken the effect?
Police Lineups
Eyewitness memory refers to memory for a criminal event. When someone witnesses a crime, the police often ask them to describe the criminal, and then they search for a suspect. Once a suspect is found, witnesses are often asked to view police lineups. Criminal investigations and convictions rely heavily on eyewitness testimony in court. In particular, the conviction of a perpetrator may depend on whether a witness selects the suspect from a police lineup. This decision includes whether to identify anyone at all, the choice of a particular person, and the confidence associated with these decisions. I am interested in how this decision process occurs and the factors that influence the decision process.
I am particularly interested in the strategies that people use when viewing a lineup. Research in my lab is using eye tracking, thinking aloud (i.e., reporting your thoughts as they occur), and questionnaires to study how people make lineup decisions. I hope this research will help us better understand the decision process—allowing us to develop better theories of how eyewitnesses make lineup decisions—provide insights into how we can refine lineup procedures and instructions in order to maximize identification accuracy, and to obtain valid indicators of the likelihood that a lineup identification is accurate. Other research in my lab concerns how the decision to identify someone from a lineup varies under different circumstances, such as when the criminal was wearing a disguise at the time of the crime or had a tattoo, or when the lineup members were presented one at a time (simultaneous) versus all at once (sequentially). Finally, I am interested in what makes lineups fair and how we can measure this. A fair lineup is one in which the witness must rely on their memory a criminal rather than inferring who the police suspect because that person stands out in some way. If a lineup is unfair, then the chances of an innocent person being identified increase, which increases the possibility of a miscarriage of justice in the form of a wrongful conviction. Eyewitness evidence is highly compelling so it is very important that the police use fair lineups.
Eyewitness Confidence
The criminal justice system must make decisions about whether eyewitnesses are reliable or not. Commonly, an eyewitness' confidence is the mostly strongly relied on cue. Research shows that confidence is strongly related to accuracy under certain, ideal conditions, but we are still learning about when confidence predicts identification accuracy, which is an issue my lab is exploring. My lab is also exploring ways to maximize the relationship between confidence and accuracy. For example, most of the research on confidence has measured confidence on a scale (e.g., 0-100%, 1-7) but in practice, the police generally ask eyewitnesses to express their confidence in their own words. We are examining ways to help that the criminal justice system interpret verbal expressions of confidence.
The Weapon Focus Effect
The Weapon Focus Effect refers to findings that witnesses have poorer eyewitness memories when they witness events involving a weapon than when they witness events not involving a weapon. Witnesses may focus on a weapon to the exclusion of other items such as the face of a perpetrator or other witnesses. However, there is little research on the boundary conditions for this effect: what circumstances strengthen or weaken the effect?