Critical Tests of Decision Models for Eyewitness Identification

众所周知，目击证人会犯辨认错误。如果目击证人不能做出正确的识别，罪犯可能会逃脱法律制裁，继续对社会构成威胁。如果证人作了虚假的指认，一个无辜的人可能会被起诉，并被判为他没有犯的罪。刑事司法系统的健康运作要求这类错误尽可能少地发生。为了尽量减少目击证人的错误，我们必须了解目击证人犯错的原因。目前的研究试图通过发展，测试和完善目击者的心理学理论来理解目击者识别错误的原因。该理论被称为“目击者模型”，它描述了作为目击者识别决策基础的记忆和决策过程，并做出了可以与数据进行比较的定量预测。这些数据来自在受控条件下进行的目击证人鉴定实验。实验的参与者成为一场上演的犯罪的目击者，然后向他们展示犯罪者在场或不在场的列队。犯罪者在场阵容模拟了现实世界中警察嫌疑人有罪的案例，而犯罪者缺席阵容则模拟了现实世界中警察嫌疑人无罪的案例。关键数据是罪犯的正确率和无辜者的错误率。当正确识别率高，错误识别率低时，鉴定证据的证明价值最大。第一个系列的实验考察了辨认证据的证明价值是如何随着警察创建列队的方式和证人用来做出辨认决定的决策过程而变化的。第二组实验检验证人如何？S决策过程将准确性和错误分布在一个阵容的成员之间。

It is well-established that eyewitnesses make identification errors. If the eyewitness is unable to make a correct identification, a criminal may escape justice and continue to present a threat to society. If the witness makes a false identification, an innocent person may be prosecuted and convicted of a crime he did not commit. The healthy functioning of the criminal justice system requires that such errors occur as infrequently as possible. In order to minimize eyewitness errors, we must understand why witnesses make errors. The present research seeks to understand the causes of eyewitness identification errors by developing, testing, and refining a psychological theory of the eyewitness. The theory, called the Witness model, describes the memory and decision processes that underlie eyewitness identification decisions, and makes quantitative predictions that can be compared to data.The data come from eyewitness identification experiments, conducted under controlled conditions. The participants in the experiments become witnesses to a staged crime, and are later shown either a perpetrator-present or a perpetrator-absent lineup. The perpetrator-present lineup simulates those real-world cases in which the police suspect is guilty, whereas the perpetrator-absent lineup simulates those real world cases in which the police suspect is innocent. The key data are the correct identification rates of the guilty and the false identification rates of the innocent. The probative value of identification evidence is maximized when the correct identification rate is high and the false identification rate is low. The first series of experiments examines how the probative value of identification evidence varies as a function of the way police create lineups and the decision processes that witnesses use to make identification decisions. The second set of experiments examines how a witness?s decision processes distribute accuracy and error across the members of a lineup.