Eyewitness Identification Confidence and Ecphoric Judgments

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

9308275 WELLS This project tests methods for determining the accuracy of eyewitness identifications. Eyewitnesses to crime often must attempt to identify crime culprits from line-ups or photospreads, and this is an important form of evidence for police investigators, judges and juries. Unfortunately, scientific studies indicate that mistaken identifications (of an innocent suspect) are not easily distinguished from accurate identifications (of the actual culprit). Especially problematic is the fact that the confidence of the eyewitness in response to a question such as "How confident are you that the person you identified is the person you saw steal the money?" shows little or no consistent relation to the accuracy of the identification. This causes considerable difficulty for crime investigators and for triers of fact (such as jurors), who must decide whether the eyewitness is accurate or mistaken. The project will undertake a series of five experiments designed to discover better ways to determine whether an eyewitness has made an accurate versus inaccurate identification. Thefts will be staged repeatedly before groups of unsuspecting people (totaling approximately 1,500 subjects for the five experiments) who will then be given photospreads and asked to identify the thief. Various conditions will be used across these five studies to test whether eyewitnesses' direct judgments of resemblance between their memories and the appearance of the identified person better predict accuracy of identification than do eyewitnesses' confidence in their accuracy, and whether the former are less vulnerable to extraneous influences than the latter. These studies will make an important theoretical contribution to our scientific understanding of eyewitness confidence stability. The results will also provide useful tools for determining the accuracy of identification evidence in actual criminal cases. ***