Research

Research - Dr. Stuart J. McKelvie

Crime Judgments and Errors in Cognition

Stuart J. McKelvie
Department of Psychology

Crime Judgments

This project concerns attitudes towards capital punishment.  Although the death penalty was officially abolished in Canada in 1998, research by Honeyman and Ogloff shows that many Canadians would welcome its use.  Although scales have been developed to measure support for capital punishment, their properties have not been systematically assessed. One purpose of Dr. McKelvie’s research is to revise a traditional scale that was developed by Peterson and Thurstone in 1933 scale and to examine its properties. To this end, he has created the Questionnaire on Capital Punishment (QCP) and has evaluated its reliability and validity.

A second goal of this research is to examine whether attitude towards capital punishment also predicts beliefs about non-capital sentencing. This is relevant to the theoretical question of whether attitude towards capital punishment reflects a deeper set of values, perhaps right-wing authoritarianism, and to the practical question of how American courts choose jurors who are “death qualified”.

Finally, the QCP is being used to examine whether exposure to the details of methods of execution affects people’s attitudes. Participants completed the QCP before and after reading details of the procedures in various methods of execution.

Errors in Cognition

One project explores a report of the anomalous finding that 9 can be judged greater than 221. In another, the hindsight effect is being investigated. It has been reported that when people are aware of an outcome they overestimate how likely they would have been to predict it. This project examines whether this occurs when the outcome is the result of football games.

Funding Sources

Student involvement