Refugee Status Determination (RSD) Psychology Evidence Group

About the 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?

Psychology evidence helps to answer these kinds of questions. Its findings represent the scientific community’s best available information about how people generally think and act. A significant body of scholarship has sought to bring these insights to bear on refugee status decision-making, where the cost of a wrong answer could hardly be higher.¹ Yet refugee status decision-makers rarely engage with this evidence. In deciding what to believe about human psychology, they rely instead on their own common sense, which is often at odds with the findings in this field.²

Refugee Status Determination (RSD) Psychology Evidence Group’s interdisciplinary team of legal scholars and psychologists explores the assumptions that underlie deception findings in refugee status rejections. Its Baseline Paper Series presents key findings from the field of psychology for use in refugee hearings. The Group’s aim is to improve refugee status decision-making by helping to ensure that fewer claimants are wrongly disbelieved.

This work is part of the Bridging Divides project, funded by the Canada First Research Excellence Fund.

¹ E.g. Jane Herlihy, Kate Gleeson & Stuart Turner, “What Assumptions about Human Behaviour Underlie Asylum Judgments?” (2010) 22 International Journal of Refugee Law 351-366; Hilary Evans Cameron, “Refugee Status Determination and the Limits of Memory” (2010) 22 International Journal of Refugee Law 469-511; Jane Herlihy, Hilary Evans Cameron & Stuart Turner, “Psychological Evidence in Refugee Status Determination” (2024) 37 Journal of Refugee Studies 938-953.

² E.g. Hilary Evans Cameron, “Risk and the Reasonable Refugee: Exploring a Key Credibility Inference in Canadian Refugee Status Rejections” (2023) 35 International Journal of Refugee Law 10-36; Jane Herlihy, Hilary Evans Cameron & Stuart Turner, “Psychological Evidence in Refugee Status Determination” (2024) 37 Journal of Refugee Studies 938-953.