Eyewitness Testimony and Suggestibility Research

Early Research on Testimony and Suggestibility

• Early research on eyewitness testimony and suggestibility started in the United States and Europe.
• James Cattell conducted an experiment on eyewitness testimony finding that people's recollections were inaccurate.
• Alfred Binet found that children's testimonies were very susceptible to suggestive questioning techniques; he concluded when asked to report everything, the answers were accurate, but when asked misleading questions, the answers were inaccurate.
• William Stern developed the "reality experiment" to study recall and recognition; he found that emotional arousal could negatively impact one's accuracy.

The Misnformation Effect

• Elizabeth Loftus found that witness recall can be altered by the phrasing of a question.
• For example, in her study, after viewing a video of a car crash, participants asked, “How fast were the cars going when they __?” responded with higher speeds when the verb “smashed” was used, and lower speeds when “bumped” or “contacted” was used.
• Those who had heard “smashed” were also more likely to report seeing broken glass when none was shown.
• The misinformation effect occurs when a witness's memory is altered by inaccurate information being presented following an event.
• There are 3 reasons for this effect:
  • Misinformation acceptance hypothesis: Witnesses may guess the answer they think the experimenter wants.
  • Source misattribution hypothesis: Witnesses may remember both accurate and inaccurate information but get confused about where they came from.
  • Relative judgment: Witnesses compare lineup members to one another and the person who looks most like the perpetrator is identified.

Lineup Bias

• Biased lineups can suggest to the witness who the police suspect and therefore who the witness should identify.
• These are considered to increase false positives.
• There are 3 biases that increase false positives:
  • Foil bias: the suspect is the only member who matches the description of the perpetrator.
  • Clothing bias: the suspect is the only member who matches the perpetrator’s clothes.
  • Instruction bias: the police fail to mention the perpetrator may not be present, rather implying they are.

Voice Identification

• Research has shown that longer voice samples, laughter, and distinctiveness combined with whispering can increase voice identification accuracy.
• Whispering alone decreases identification accuracy.

Confident Witnesses and Accuracy

• There is a small positive correlation between witness accuracy and confidence.
• However, this relationship is influenced by several moderators including the timing of confidence assessment, post-identification feedback, and repeated expressions of a decision.

Estimate Variable: Age

• Research suggests older adults (60+) have limitations in witness identification, being less likely to correctly identify perpetrators from a target-present lineup and more likely to make incorrect decisions from a target-absent lineup.
• Older adults generally underperform compared to younger adults.

Estimate Variable: Race

• The cross-race effect (also known as the other-race effect or own-race bias) is the phenomenon of witnesses remembering own-race faces with greater accuracy than faces from other races.
• Own-race faces produce higher correct identifications and lower false positives than other-race faces.
• Although being intoxicated had a larger negative effect on recognizing same-race faces compared to other-race faces (Asians and Europeans), explanations for the cross-race effect include:
  • Attitudes: people with fewer prejudices are more inclined to distinguish among members of other races (no support).
  • Physiognomic homogeneity: some races have less variability in their faces (i.e., they look alike) (no support).
  • Interracial contact: the more contact you have with other races, the better you will be at identifying them (some support).

Estimate Variable: Weapon Focus

• Weapon focus: witnesses’ attention is drawn to a weapon, it is more difficult for them to process other info from the crime scene and can negatively impact memory of other details during the event.

Explore the foundational studies on eyewitness testimony and suggestibility. This quiz covers key experiments by researchers such as James Cattell, Alfred Binet, and Elizabeth Loftus, highlighting how emotional arousal and question phrasing can impact memory recall. Test your knowledge on these significant contributions to psychology.