Q.In terms of helping solve an important social problem such as crime, which branch of psychology do you think is most suitable. Identify the field and discuss the concerns of the psychologists working in this field.

For a social problem such as crime, the branch of psychology most directly suitable is the field concerned with law and criminology, since it studies exactly the psychological questions the legal system has to answer -- memory, judgment, and behaviour around crime. …

Among the branches of psychology connected to the problem of crime, the field concerned with law and criminology is the most directly suitable, since it is built specifically around the psychological questions the legal system has always had to answer in some way, whether or not it had good psychological evidence to answer them with.

Psychologists working in this field are concerned with a cluster of closely related questions. They study how reliably a witness actually remembers an accident, a street fight, or a murder, and how accurately that witness is able to report those facts once they are called to testify in court -- since eyewitness memory, though often treated by juries as highly trustworthy, can be affected by stress, the passage of time, and how questions are asked. They study what factors genuinely influence the decision a jury reaches, which matters because juries are meant to decide guilt based on evidence but are also human decision-makers subject to the same psychological biases studied elsewhere in psychology. They investigate what signs are treated as dependable evidence of guilt or of deception, an area directly relevant to how police and courts assess a suspect's or witness's credibility. They also study what factors are considered important in holding a person responsible for their own actions, and what degree of punishment is considered a just response to a given criminal act -- questions that connect psychology to deeper issues of moral reasoning and fairness in sentencing. …