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Why Do Eyewitnesses Make So Many Mistakes?
Author(s) -
Warnick Dell H.,
Sanders Glenn S.
Publication year - 1980
Publication title -
journal of applied social psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.822
H-Index - 111
eISSN - 1559-1816
pISSN - 0021-9029
DOI - 10.1111/j.1559-1816.1980.tb00716.x
Subject(s) - eyewitness identification , psychology , identification (biology) , social psychology , computer science , relation (database) , data mining , botany , biology
Previous research on eyewitness identification has demonstrated high rates of error. Subjects have frequently identified innocent targets as the “criminal” they had seen earlier (false identifications) or had falsely claimed that the criminal was not in the line‐up (misses). The present study examines whether identification error rates are inflated by pressures in the typical experimental situation to “make a guess” regardless of one's confidence in the accuracy of the response. It was found that providing an explicit option for subjects to respond “don't know” significantly decreased false identifications and misses with no cost to the proportion of correct identifications. The addition of written and verbal instructions emphasizing the acceptability of the “don't know” option produced a marginally significant further decline in identification errors, again without cost to correct identifications. The discussion considered implications of the present results for experimental and actual police line‐up procedures.