Barbara Spellman
I am a Cognitive/Social Psychologist with an appointment in a Law School. (I also have a law degree.) My basic interests are in thinking, reasoning, and social cognition; and my law research considers different ways to apply psychology to law and to public policy more generally. I teach the standard Evidence course but also many courses (mostly seminars) with Psych/Law themes, for example: Behavioral Decision Making and Law, Psychological Foundations of Evidence Law (I have a new book on that topic), and a standard Psychology and Law course. From 2010-15 I was Editor of Perspectives on Psychological Science and spent a lot of time on issues of Open and Changing Science.
Primary Interests:
- Applied Social Psychology
- Causal Attribution
- Judgment and Decision Making
- Law and Public Policy
- Research Methods, Assessment
- Social Cognition
Note from the Network: The holder of this profile has certified having all necessary rights, licenses, and authorization to post the files listed below. Visitors are welcome to copy or use any files for noncommercial or journalistic purposes provided they credit the profile holder and cite this page as the source.
Image Gallery
Video Gallery
Talking to Real People about Forensic Statistics
Select video to watch
-
1:28:29 Talking to Real People about Forensic Statistics
Length: 1:28:29
-
3:38 "The Psychological Foundations of Evidence Law"
Length: 3:38
-
43:54 Challenges for Journals: Encouraging Sound Science
Length: 43:54
Journal Articles:
- Anderson, M. C., & Spellman, B. A. (1995). On the status of inhibitory mechanisms in cognition: Memory retrieval as a model case. Psychological Review, 102, 68-100.
- Cohen, L. B., Rundell, L. J., Spellman, B. A., & Cashon, C. H. (1999). Infants’ perception of causal chains. Psychological Science, 10, 412-418.
- Dunn, E. W., & Spellman, B. A. (2003). Forgetting by remembering: Stereotype inhibition through rehearsal of alternative aspects of identity. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 39, 420-433.
- Gilbert, E., Tenney, E. R, Holland, C., & Spellman, B. A. (2015). Conterfactuals, control, and causation: Why knowledgeable people get blamed more. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 41, 643-658.
- Green, A. J., Spellman, B. A., Dusek, J. A., Eichenbaum, H., & Levy, W. G. (2001). Relational learning with and without awareness: Transitive inference using non-verbal stimuli in humans. Memory & Cognition, 29, 893-902.
- Kincannon, A., & Spellman, B. A. (2003). The use of category and similarity information in limiting hypotheses. Memory & Cognition, 31, 114-132.
- Nosek, B. A., Alter, G., Banks, G. C., Borsboom, D., Bowman, S. D., Breckler, S. J., Buck, S., Chambers, C. D., Chin, G., Christensen, G., Contestabile, M., Dafoe, A., Eich, E., Freese, J., Glennerster, R., Goroff, D., Green, D. P., Hesse, B., Humphreys, M., Ishiyama, J., Karlan, D., Kraut, A., Lupia, A., Mabry, P., Madon, T. A., Malhotra, N., Mayo-Wilson, E., McNutt, M., Miguel, E., Levy Paluck, E., Simonsohn, U., Soderberg, C., Spellman, B. A., Turitto, J., VandenBos, G., Vazire, S., Wagenmakers, E. J., Wilson, R., & Yarkoni, T. (2015). Promoting an open research culture. Science, 348, 1422-1425. doi: 10.1126/science.aab2374
- Spellman, B. A. (2015). A short (personal) future history of Revolution 2.0. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10, 886-899. DOI: 10.1177/1745691615609918
- Spellman, B. A. (1997). Crediting causality. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 126, 1-26.
- Spellman, B. A. (1996). Acting as intuitive scientists: Contingency judgments are made while controlling for alternative potential causes. Psychological Science, 7, 337-342.
- Spellman, B. A., & Holyoak, K. J. (1996). Pragmatics in analogical mapping. Cognitive Psychology, 31, 307-366.
- Spellman, B. A., & Holyoak, K. J. (1992). If Saddam is Hitler then who is George Bush? Analogical mapping between systems of social roles. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 62, 913-933.
- Spellman, B. A., Holyoak, K. J., & Morrison, R. G. (2001). Analogical priming via semantic relations. Memory & Cognition, 29, 383-393.
- Spellman, B. A., & Mandel, D. R. (1999). When possibility informs reality: Counterfactual thinking as a cue to causality. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 8, 120-123.
- Spellman, B. A., Price, C. M., & Logan, J. (2001). How two causes are different from one: The use of (un)conditional information in Simpson’s paradox. Memory & Cognition, 29, 193-208.
- Tenney, E. R., MacCoun, R. J., Spellman, B. A., & Hastie, R. (2007). Calibration trumps confidence as the basis for witness credibility. Psychological Science, 18, 46-50. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01847.x
- Tenney, E. R., Small, J. E., Kondrad, R. L., Jaswal, V. K., & Spellman, B. A. (2011). Accuracy, confidence, and calibration: How young children and adults assess credibility. Developmental Psychology, 47, 1065-1077. doi.org/10.1037/a0023273
Other Publications:
- Robinson, P. H., & Spellman, B. A. (2005). Sentencing decisions: Matching the decisionmaker to the decision nature. Columbia Law Review, 105(4), 1124-1161.
- Spellman, B. A., Gilbert, E., & Corker, K. R. (in press). Open science. In J. Wixted (Ed.), The Stevens' Handbook of Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience, Volume V: Methodology.
- Spellman, B. A., Kincannon, A., & Stose, S. (2005). The relation between counterfactual and causal reasoning. Invited chapter to appear in D. R. Mandel, D. J. Hilton, & P. Catellani (Eds.), The psychology of counterfactual thinking. London: Routledge Research.
Courses Taught:
- Advanced Experimental Methods
- Behavioral Decision Making and Law
- Causal and Counterfactual Reasoning
- Cognition
- Evidence
- Psychology and Law: Cognitive and Social Issues
- Psychology of Information and Persuasion
- Psychology of Wrongful Convictions
- Research Methods and Data Analysis
- Thinking About Thinking
- Thinking and Reasoning
Barbara Spellman
580 Massie Road
University of Virginia School of Law
Charlottesville, Virginia 22903
United States of America
- Phone: (434) 243-4925