By doing our research we wish to provide the courts and lawyers as well as the police information of various psychological issues to be used for their purposes. The two professional domains, psychology and law, are constantly overlapping. During it’s over 100 years marriage with psychology, law has increasingly recognised the experimental strides that psychology as a science has made and integrated many findings into the practise of law. Studies on e.g. eyewitness identification, memory, confession, stalking victimization, human development and attachment have been ingratiated into the practice of criminal and civil law. We aim to continue this work.
Psychological information can be used, misused or nonused in law. Our research group benefits of the practical experience our principal researcher has from working as a senior researcher at the Finnish National Bureau of Investigation for ten years and as a managing-partner at the psychology and law firm PsyJuridica Ltd since 2010. We feel that this experience has increased our understanding of the appropriateness of using psychology in the legal and forensic settings.
Our research is pursued in a way that will be maximally productive in advancing understanding of human behaviour in law-related activities and in ways most likely to convince lawmakers and legal practitioners to seek out and apply for the information. Psychology can’t ignore the law’s need and concerns if it wishes to be relevant to legal actors and implementers. For this reason, we conduct research with high ecological validity. Due to our networks, we have had a unique possibility to conduct research within the police and a law firm. This allows us to study law-related behaviours of legal and nonlegal actors in real life instead of experimental simulations. For us, placing great thought to the external and ecological validity of our research starts from questioning why we study what we study.