Testing the Pristine Conditions Hypothesis of the Confidence-Accuracy Relationship in Eyewitness Identification

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It has been estimated that eyewitness identification plays a role in approximately 80,000 criminal cases per year. Eyewitnesses can provide crucial evidence in criminal cases, but eyewitness identifications are not always accurate. Eyewitnesses can make two kinds of mistakes. They can fail to identify guilty individuals from lineups and they can falsely identify innocent people from lineups. Both types of errors present a threat to public safety because they contribute to perpetrators being free to commit additional crimes. In addition, mistaken identifications risk the liberty of innocent suspects. For these reasons, it is important to better understand the situations and procedures that are associated with accurate eyewitness identifications.One important factor that may be used to predict eyewitness accuracy is the witness’s confidence at the time of the identification. A number of studies have found that when a witness identifies a suspect with high confidence that the witness is quite likely to be correct. This is particularly true when ideal procedures are used by police to obtain the identification. However, more recently, some studies have found that there are situations where, even when ideal procedures are used, highly confident witnesses are not always highly accurate. The researchers have proposed a series of studies using virtual reality recreations of crimes to help understand when highly confident witnesses are likely to be highly accurate and when they are likely to be less accurate. Use of virtual reality can create more lifelike and emotionally engaging events than have traditionally been used by eyewitness researchers. The research focuses on testing two ideas. The first idea is that some witnesses might have a better understanding of how their own memory and perception works than other witnesses. Witnesses who are more in tune with how their memory and perception works are likely to only say they are confident when the probability of being correct is high. Witnesses who have a poor understanding of how their memory and perception works, may mistakenly say they are confident, even when the odds of being correct are lower. The second idea is that there may be witnessing conditions that are so poor (e.g., poor lighting, very long distance) that even the best witnesses are unlikely to be very accurate and witnesses may not fully take into account how poor the witnessing conditions are when making their confidence judgments. These hypotheses will be tested through a series of experiments testing both child and adult witnesses and will provide a better understanding of how eyewitness confidence and accuracy are related.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.