Psychology Research Evidence (PRE) Project

Should a refugee status decision-maker expect that a claimant will remember the date of their assault? Should they expect that a claimant facing pressing danger would have fled at the first opportunity? How much consistency should they expect among the claimant’s various accounts of the same event? How much detail should they expect the claimant to remember?

Such judgments should be informed by psychology research evidence – the body of findings that the scientific community considers to be the best available information about how people generally think and act (e.g. Herlihy & Turner 2010; Evans Cameron 2010; Herlihy, Evans Cameron & Turner 2023). Yet studies suggest that, in assessing a claimant’s truthfulness, refugee status decision-makers rarely engage with psychology research evidence and instead rely exclusively on their own common sense – which is often at odds with the empirical findings (e.g. Evans Cameron 2023, Herlihy et al 2023).

Over the coming years, the PRE Project’s interdisciplinary team of legal scholars and psychologists will be translating key psychology research findings into evidence for use in refugee hearings. By bringing this crucial evidence to bear, the PRE Project will help to reduce the proportion of wrongful rejections in refugee status decisions.

This work is part of the Bridging Divides project.