One the new Psychological research reveals that “Having
to Make Quick Decisions Helps Witnesses Identify the Bad Guy in a Line up”.
Eyewitness identification evidence is often persuasive in the courtroom and yet
current eyewitness identification tests often fail to pick the culprit. Even
worse, these tests sometimes result in wrongfully accusing innocent suspects.
Now psychological scientists are proposing a radical alternative to the
traditional police lineup that focuses on eyewitnesses' confidence judgments.
In a new article forthcoming in Psychological Science, a
journal of the Association for Psychological Science, Neil Brewer of Flinders
University and colleagues report a new type of lineup in which witnesses are
presented with lineup photos one at a time and are simply asked to rate how
confident they are that the person in each photo is the culprit. Importantly,
witnesses are not given time to mull over their assessments; they must respond
within a few seconds.
Brewer and his colleagues have tested this technique,
called "deadline confidence judgments," with more than 900
participants across several experiments conducted over the past three years.
In each experiment, volunteers watched short films
depicting crimes or a mundane event in which one person was prominent.
Either five minutes later or a full week later, half of
the participants were shown a series of individual pictures from a lineup of 12
people and asked to make a confidence decision about each face within three
seconds of it appearing on the computer screen. They were asked to choose one
of 11 options, ranging from "absolutely confident that this is the
culprit" to "absolutely certain this is not the culprit."
The other half of the participants were shown the same
faces but given as long as they liked to answer whether each face was or was
not the culprit (yes or no). Sometimes the photos included the culprit and
sometimes they did not.
Using an algorithm to infer a decision from participants'
confidence ratings, the researchers found that overall classification accuracy
was 20 to 30 percent higher for the new lineup than the conventional one.
Moreover, the researchers were able to identify
particular patterns of confidence judgments that showed either a very high or
very low likelihood that an individual witness's judgments were accurate.
The finding that eyewitnesses' judgments were more
accurate under a deadline fits with previous research, which has shown that
accurate eyewitness identifications are made significantly faster than inaccurate
ones, and that a number of outside factors are removed with a short deadline.
"A weakness of the traditional test lies in the fact
that it requires a witness to make a single 'yes' or 'no' decision about a
lineup, with plenty of time to reflect on their decision," says Brewer.
"But the time lapse from the initial viewing to the response often
mitigates against witnesses making accurate decisions, as does an array of
external factors."
These external factors include the conditions under which
people view lineup photos, constraints on attention, and social cues that bias
the witness towards a positive identification. For example, a witness might
think that she should know they answer just because she viewed a photo for a
long time.
According to Brewer, traditional identification tests
often fail because the witness feels pressure to identify a guilty party. This
new study suggests that witnesses are more likely to make accurate
identifications when they do not have to be so precise.
With the rising number of DNA exonerations and the
frequent failure of witnesses to identify the true culprit, Brewer believes
that there is a compelling case for a new system of lineups.
Psychtronics.com gives the only interesting topics of psychology and you need not to be a professional to understand the articles in the psychtronics. They are easy to understand to every one and it is mainly for the college students and Psychiatrists.
Like us in FB to get Updates: www.facebook.com/psychtronics
Post a Comment