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Presence of administrators differentially impacts eyewitness discriminability for same‐ and other‐race identifications
Author(s) -
Rothweiler Jesse N.,
Goodwin Kerri A.,
Kukucka Jeff
Publication year - 2020
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.3733
Subject(s) - eyewitness identification , psychology , suspect , apprehension , identification (biology) , social psychology , race (biology) , eyewitness testimony , social facilitation , criminology , cognitive psychology , biology , database , botany , relation (database) , computer science
Summary Best practice guidelines recommend that eyewitness lineup administrators be blind to a suspect's identity, but no research has investigated whether the mere presence of a lineup administrator impacts eyewitness identification decisions. Informed by social facilitation theory, we predicted that the presence of an audience would differentially impact identification accuracy for same‐ and other‐race identifications. Participants ( N = 191) viewed same‐ and other‐race lineups either with an audience or alone. Although the presence of an audience did not directly impact identification accuracy, significant indirect effects indicated that the audience provoked evaluation apprehension which hindered other‐race identification accuracy and improved same‐race identification accuracy. We suggest that using double‐blind lineup procedures may not sufficiently protect eyewitness identification accuracy when making other‐race lineup decisions in the presence of others.