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The effect of biased lineup instructions on eyewitness identification confidence
Author(s) -
Charman Steve D.,
Carol Rolando N.,
Schwartz Shari L.
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
applied cognitive psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.719
H-Index - 100
eISSN - 1099-0720
pISSN - 0888-4080
DOI - 10.1002/acp.3401
Subject(s) - debiasing , psychology , witness , eyewitness identification , identification (biology) , social psychology , computer science , data mining , botany , relation (database) , programming language , biology
Summary Although it is well‐known that biased lineup instructions (i.e., those that do not inform witnesses the perpetrator may not be in the lineup) inflate false identifications, their effects on witness confidence are less well understood due to methodological limitations of past studies. We report two studies that use novel methodologies to obviate these limitations. Study 1 ( N = 177) demonstrated that biased lineup instructions increased witnesses' average estimates of the likelihood that a lineup member is guilty. Study 2 ( N = 137) introduces a novel debiasing paradigm that allows a parsing of choosers into those who made an identification only because of the biased instructions (induced choosers), and those who would have chosen despite the instructions (inherent choosers). Biased lineup instructions inflated confidence only among induced choosers, but not among inherent choosers. Contrary to legal reasoning, witness confidence is an insufficient metric to determine the suggestiveness of biased instructions.