Culture, Law, and Justice

Culture, Law, and Justice When it comes to the basics of human behavior, much of the research in this chapter can be universally applied. In eyewitness testimony, the problems and limitations of human memory—as seen in our ability to accurately encode, store, and retrieve certain types of information—are universal. In police interviews and interrogations, suspects all over the world, including some who are innocent, are more likely to confess when they are isolated and intensely pressured than when they are not. In courtrooms wherever juries are used, their decision making will invariably reflect the joint influences of their personal dispositions, the informa- tion they receive in court, and the conformity dynamics that seize hold of small groups. Finally, recurring stories of prison abuses have shown that prison is a social setting that tends to bring out the worst in guards and their prisoners— wherever they are.

Although the similarities are clear, they should not mask important cross-cultural differences. Because cultures have different norms, customs, and values, they also create different laws to regulate their citizens’ behavior. To be sure, certain universal values have evolved among humans and are passed from one generation to the next, such as prohibitions against physical violence, taking someone’s property without consent, and deception in important transactions. In other ways, however, the world’s cultural and religious groups differ markedly in the behaviors they scorn and seek to regulate. In some countries but not in others, it is against the law to have sex outside of marriage, take more than one husband or wife, assist in a suicide, gamble, eat meat, or drink alcohol. Based on the belief in an afterlife, some religions prohibit autopsies. Others impose strict dress codes, particularly for women.