Beyond Common Sense and Human Experience: Lay Perceptions of Witness Coercion
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Perceptions of the use of coercive tactics in witness interviews were examined. Canadian community members ( N = 293) were asked to read a transcript of a witness interview that included either (a) threats/overt coercion, (b) minimization/covert coercion, or (c) no coercion, and answer questions about the interview. Participants rated the threat transcript as being the most coercive, containing the most pressure, involving the most serious consequences for withholding information, and eliciting the most negative feelings from witnesses. Conversely, the minimization transcript tended to be rated less negatively than the threat transcript and was also rated as being the most effective for gathering information. Results indicate that laypeople recognize the issues with explicitly coercive police tactics, but are less clear on the problems with subtler forms of coercion. The implications for the truth-seeking function of the justice system and the role of expert testimony in the courtroom are discussed.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.056 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".