Why does eyewitness testimony lack validity

Because individuals with certain psychological disorders, such as antisocial personality disorder and substance dependence, are at high risk for criminal involvement, they are also at heightened risk for false identifications by eyewitnesses. Surveys show that most jurors place heavy weight on eyewitness testimony when deciding whether a suspect is guilty. But although eyewitness reports are sometimes accurate, jurors should not accept them uncritically because of the many factors that can bias such reports.

For example, jurors tend to give more weight to the testimony of eyewitnesses who report that they are very sure about their identifications even though most studies indicate that highly confident eyewitnesses are generally only slightly more accurate—and sometimes no more so—than those who are less confident. In addition to educating jurors about the uncertainties surrounding eyewitness testimony, adhering to specific rules for the process of identifying suspects can make that testimony more accurate.

Reconstructing Memories The uncritical acceptance of eyewitness accounts may stem from a popular misconception of how memory works. Many people believe that human memory works like a video recorder: the mind records events and then, on cue, plays back an exact replica of them. On the contrary, psychologists have found that memories are reconstructed rather than played back each time we recall them.

The act of remembering, says eminent memory researcher and psychologist Elizabeth F. Many researchers have created false memories in normal individuals; what is more, many of these subjects are certain that the memories are real. In one well-known study, Loftus and her colleague Jacqueline Pickrell gave subjects written accounts of four events, three of which they had actually experienced. The fourth story was fiction; it centered on the subject being lost in a mall or another public place when he or she was between four and six years old.

After reading each story, subjects were asked to write down what else they remembered about the incident or to indicate that they did not remember it at all. Eyewitness Testimony slides. Next discuss the assignment.

Have students discuss their responses. Different people can see the same event and come away with very different memories. This is a good entry point to discuss the nature of long-term memory and how it is both constructive at encoding and reconstructive at retrieval.

The instructor can discuss work on the misinformation effect and eyewitness testimony here. Schema theory can also be discussed. Slides 5 and 6 review the myth and the reality of memory. The goal of this day is to give an overview of how memory works. There are various ways of organizing the memory unit: historically from Ebbinghaus to current models, or focusing on a particular model such as Information processing almost 50 years out of date, but still a powerful way of organizing concepts.

Select an organization that makes it easiest for you to discuss key memory concepts. Use Activity 3 see below to show how quickly and easily memory can be distorted.

The balance of the class time can be spent discussing applications of memory research. Possible topics are listed in the concept map on Slide 7. All of these topics have important implications.

Students often appreciate learning how to leverage memory research to improve their study habits because it directly relates to their current experience. Instructors may want to refer students to my video series on how to study effectively www.

Concept Checks The following formative assessment questions allow both you and the students to gauge their level of understanding of the unit. Be sure to have students respond individually so both you and they can see how well the class understands the concepts.

Then they can discuss as pairs or as a class. There are a variety of high tech clickers and low-tech fingers methods that can be used to administer these concept check questions. How Bias and Expectations Shape Perception and Memory For this assignment, you will listen to an excerpt from a podcast that tells the story of the most famous football game in psychology. What makes it famous? You will have to listen to find out, but it is directly relevant to our next unit. Below is the link to the podcast.

Start and end at the designated times. Of course, you are welcome to listen to the second half as well if you are interested. Reflection questions Write a paragraph in reflection to each question.

Bring your reflections with you to class. We will be discussing them. Eyewitness Memory Activity This activity introduces students to the challenge of accurate eyewitness testimony and the misinformation effect. The students will watch a video of a bicyclist assisting police in chasing a thief. They will then be asked questions about the video.

Some of the questions contain misleading post-event information MPI. Then, students are asked about the presence or absence of certain details in the video, some of which are present and some of which are absent. Students can see their results, and the class results can also be compiled.

This activity follows a typical misinformation effect paradigm: subjects witness an event, are introduced to a mix of accurate and inaccurate post-event information, then tested for the accuracy of their memories of the event. The MPI is introduced through leading questions. In the post-event information, half the items mentioned were present in the video and half were not.

Then during the detailed recall portion, half of the items listed were also listed in the post-event information and half were not. There are four groups:. Each cell contains five items. In addition, there are six filler questions in the post-event information; all refer to details that were present in the video.

A hit would be a yes response to an item present in the video. A false alarm is a yes response to an item that was not in the video. Sporer SL. Lessons from the origins of eyewitness testimony research in Europe. Appl Cognit Psychol. Eyewitness Testimony.

Loftus EF. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press; Perceptions and credibility: Understanding the nuances of eyewitness testimony. Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice. Innocence Project. Gary Dotson. Updated December Updated January Royal Clark, Jr.

Published June Rethinking the reliability of eyewitness memory. Perspect Psychol Sci. National Criminal Justice Reference Service.

Washington, D. Department of Justice; Reconstruction of automobile destruction: An example of the interaction between language and memory. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior. Intelligence, authority and blame conformity: Co-witness influence is moderated by the perceived competence of the information source.

J Police Crim Psych. The neuroscience of memory: Implications for the courtroom. Nat Rev Neurosci. Looking down the barrel of a gun: What do we know about the weapon focus effect? Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition. Social Psychological and Personality Science. Pers Soc Psychol Bull. A cross-race effect in metamemory: Predictions of face recognition are more accurate for members of our own race.

Cross-racial misidentification: A call to action in Washington State and beyond. Seattle University of Law Review. Eyewitness identification: Lineup instructions and the absence of the offender. Journal of Applied Psychology. Eyewitness identification procedures: Recommendations for lineups and photospreads. Law and Human Behavior. The eyewitness post identification feedback effect 15 years later: Theoretical and policy implications.

Psychology, Public Policy, and Law. The new science of eyewitness memory. Psychology of Learning and Motivation. Your Privacy Rights. To change or withdraw your consent choices for VerywellMind. At any time, you can update your settings through the "EU Privacy" link at the bottom of any page. These choices will be signaled globally to our partners and will not affect browsing data.

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Table of Contents. Researchers had subjects watch a video in pairs. Both subjects sat in front of the same screen, but because they wore differently polarized glasses, they saw two different versions of a video, projected onto a screen. In the video, Eric the electrician is seen wandering through an unoccupied house and helping himself to the contents thereof. A total of eight details were different between the two videos.

Four of these questions dealt with details that were different in the two versions of the video, so subjects had the chance to influence one another.

Then subjects worked individually on 20 additional memory test questions. Eight of these were for details that were different in the two videos. That is, subjects allowed their co-witnesses to corrupt their memories for what they had seen. In addition to correctly remembering many details of the crimes they witness, eyewitnesses often need to remember the faces and other identifying features of the perpetrators of those crimes.

Eyewitnesses are often asked to describe that perpetrator to law enforcement and later to make identifications from books of mug shots or lineups. The eyewitness is given a set of small pictures of perhaps six or eight individuals who are dressed similarly and photographed in similar circumstances. If the eyewitness identifies the suspect, then the investigation of that suspect is likely to progress.

If a witness identifies a foil or no one, then the police may choose to move their investigation in another direction. This process is modeled in laboratory studies of eyewitness identifications. In these studies, research subjects witness a mock crime often as a short video and then are asked to make an identification from a photo or a live lineup.

Sometimes the lineups are target present, meaning that the perpetrator from the mock crime is actually in the lineup, and sometimes they are target absent, meaning that the lineup is made up entirely of foils. The subjects, or mock witnesses , are given some instructions and asked to pick the perpetrator out of the lineup.

The particular details of the witnessing experience, the instructions, and the lineup members can all influence the extent to which the mock witness is likely to pick the perpetrator out of the lineup, or indeed to make any selection at all.

Mock witnesses and indeed real witnesses can make errors in two different ways. They can fail to pick the perpetrator out of a target present lineup by picking a foil or by neglecting to make a selection , or they can pick a foil in a target absent lineup wherein the only correct choice is to not make a selection. Some factors have been shown to make eyewitness identification errors particularly likely.