Eyewitness testimony.

By Gary L Wells, Elizabeth A. Olson. Annual Review of Psychology, 2003

969 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The criminal justice system relies heavily on eyewitness identification for investigating and prosecuting crimes. Psychology has built the only scientific literature on eyewitness identification and has warned the justice system of problems with eyewitness identification evidence. Recent DNA exoneration cases have corroborated the warnings of eyewitness identification researchers by showing that mistaken eyewitness identification was the largest single factor contributing to the conviction of these innocent people. We review major developments in the experimental literature concerning the way that various factors relate to the accuracy of eyewitness identification. These factors include characteristics of the witness, characteristics of the witnessed event, characteristics of testimony, lineup content, lineup instructions, and methods of testing. Problems with the literature are noted with respect to both the relative paucity of theory and the scarcity of base-rate information from actual cases.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a2b70f8bf0183b2026d0c0c80a3aedfe4ebdd980

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Citations in the corpus

The Salience of Social Contextual Factors in Appraisals of Police Interactions with Citizens: A Randomized Factorial Experiment (2014, background): “As an example, eyewitness identification research makes clear that people’s evaluations of others are shaped not only by the objective events they have witnessed, but also by their prior attitudes and values (Wells and Olson 2003).”
Of guns and geese: a meta-analytic review of the ‘weapon focus’ literature (2013, background): “…http://www.tandfonline.com this finding using a goose (see also Pickel, 1999), laboratory studies have historically investigated this effect using weapons such as guns and knives (e.g. Loftus, Loftus, & Messo, 1987) resulting in the term weapon focus (e.g. Loftus, 1979).”
Don’t Worry, Be Sad! On the Cognitive, Motivational, and Interpersonal Benefits of Negative Mood (2013, neutral): “Memory is probably the most fundamental cognitive faculty (Forgas & Eich, in press; Loftus, 1979).”
The correction of errors committed with high confidence (2006, background): “…a considerable research literature, going back to Müller and Schumann (1894), Webb (1917), Melton and Irwin (1940), McGeoch (1942), Osgood (1949) and Barnes and Underwood (l959) through Loftus (1979) and J. R. Anderson and Reder (1999), showing that competing information results in interference.”
The Psychology of Interrogations and Confessions: A Handbook (2003, background): “Powers, Andriks and Loftus (1979) found that female subjects were significantly more suggestible than male subjects.”
The Effect of Rapport in Forensic Interviewing (2002, methodology): “For example, subjects interviewed by higher status individuals, such as a senior police officer in uniform, produce longer recall reports although there is not necessarily a corresponding increase in accuracy and completeness (Loftus, 1996).”
Exploring the Nature of Traumatic Memory (2001, positive): “The event encoded into memory simply cannot be a ‘‘controlled’’ variable in the laboratory science sense, as in landmark work of Loftus and her colleagues with systematically altered films of car accidents (Loftus, 1975, 1979).”
Research methods to investigate significant life experiences: review and recommendations (2006, background): “The problem is accentuated when people are forced to recall details of events which were sudden and unexpected or which occurred on the periphery of their attention, as in the case of many trial witnesses (Loftus, 1979).”
Feeling and Doing: Affective Influences on Interpersonal Behavior (2002, background): “However, as perceivers use highly constructive strategies to recall their experiences, eyewitness testimonies may well be contaminated by subsequent, unrelated information (Loftus, 1979).”
Choosing prediction over explanation in psychology: Lessons from machine learning (2017, background): “Yet eyewit-nesses frequently misremember events (Loftus & Palmer, 1996), and suspects may be motivated to respond falsely.”