False Confessions and How they Occur

Because we want you to be prepared to communicate scientific findings to a wide variety of audiences, we want you to write these essays so that the general public could understand them. For each of your essays, here is what we would like to see you do:
Each essay should be written in APA format, particularly with respect to the way you cite and reference articles.
Imagine that a coworker, supervisor, or client asked you to report on and make policy recommendations about a forensic psychology issue. You should think of your essay as a report that you might write for this purpose.
o Example: A law enforcement agency wants to know what the current research says about how to conduct eyewitness lineups. You would conduct a literature search on recent papers that discuss, for example, whether possible suspects should be presented one-at-a-time or all-at-once. After reading those articles, you would in theory have an idea of what way is best. So you summarize all of that research and recommend what you then conclude is the best way to conduct the lineups.
Each essay should start with an overview of the topic. Summarize and explain what the topic is that you are going to write about.
Next, you should summarize the articles that we provided to you for your chosen topic. What did each article set out to learn? What did they do? What did they find? What conclusions did they make? Again, be sure to try and communicate this to a non-technical audience.