NCJ Number
190150
Journal
Law and Human Behavior Volume: 25 Issue: 3 Dated: June 2001 Pages: 299-315
Date Published
June 2001
Length
17 pages
Annotation
Two experiments tested the hypothesis that subtle, nonverbal post-identification feedback from a lineup administrator can affect an eyewitness's confidence in his/her selection just as powerfully as can explicit verbal statements.
Abstract
In the first experiment, two participants were randomly assigned the roles of witness and interviewer. The witness watched a simulated theft video. Afterward, the interviewer showed the witness a photo lineup and obtained a statement of identification confidence. The interviewers' beliefs about the thief's position within the lineup were manipulated by a statement from the experimenter. This experiment involved 104 introductory psychology students, who were randomly assigned to the role of either participant witness (n=52) or participant interviewer (n=52). Each interviewer/witness dyad was randomly assigned to one of the four conditions of the experiment. Under the first condition, the interviewer received no information about the thief's position in the lineup; in the second condition, the interviewer was led to believe that the thief was lineup member number 5 (most popular choice in the pilot study); in the third condition, the interviewer was led to believe that the thief was lineup member number 3 (runner-up choice in the pilot study); and in the fourth condition, the interviewer was led to believe that the thief was lineup member number 6 (lineup member who looked dramatically different from others in the lineup). In the second experiment, researchers showed the videotaped interviews collected in the first experiment to a new set of participants, so as to assess the perceived credibility of the participant witnesses as a function of the lineup administrators' expectation manipulation. This was to test whether the confidence inflation/deflation effects due to lineup administrators' expectations would, in turn, influence participant jurors' judgments about the credibility of the witness in the first experiment. This experiment involved 80 undergraduate students. The findings from the two-part experiment showed that instructing lineup administrators to refrain from providing witnesses with any feedback about their identifications was not an effective means of preventing post-identification confidence inflation/deflation effects. When lineup administrators know who the suspect is, there is a definite risk that their reactions to eyewitnesses' lineup choices will influence eyewitnesses' statements of identification confidence. Research limitations are discussed. 3 tables and 26 references