The case of Kelly Michaels demonstrates why reliability and validity show up in
every psychology textbook. They deserve to be integrated into your life. Her story
also might inspire you to become a forensic psychologist.  “It’s like public execution, but you stay alive to go at it again, and again, day after day,” Kelly Michaels told Oprah Winfrey in 2003 (you can search for the interview on
YouTube). It started when the police knocked on her door as the 23-year-old aspiring
actress was getting ready for work at the Wee Care Day Care. Her name had been mentioned in a case of child sex abuse. The police took her for questioning and released her after hearing her story. She thought the short nightmare was over. But they came back and accused her of playing the piano nude, “Making poopie cakes with the children,
inserting silverware into the children… just horrible things.” Social psychology in the courtroom

It became the longest trial in New Jersey history and cost multiple millions of dollars. And it was all an illusion. In the absence of direct physical evidence, the prosecution used anatomically correct dolls as they interviewed pre-school aged children about
what had happened and where they had been touched. But here’s the catch. Most of the
prosecution’s interviewers were biased to believe that Kelly Michaels had abused the children. For example, to confirm what they already believed, the detectives asked children
leading questions such as, “Where could Miss Kelly have touched you?” The detectives
had not been psychology majors, or they had forgotten what they had learned, because
they did not recognize their own leading questions. Instead, the detectives believed that they were measuring what they intended to measure when children touched or played with the doll’s genitalia. They failed to consider that the children might have played with any unusual feature on a naked doll simply because it was a novelty (see Bruck & Ceci, 2009). After three years of legal proceedings and millions of dollars, they still did not understand reliability, validity, or confirmation bias. They sent an innocent Kelly Michaels to prison for 47 years (she
served five of them, until the decision was overturned). Social psychology in the courtroom

MLA Format