Lineup administrators' expectations: their impact on eyewitness confidence.
This research focuses on how lineup administrators influence eyewitnesses' postidentification confidence. What happens to witness confidence when a witness makes an identification that confirms the lineup administrator's expectations; what happens when this expectation is not confirmed? In Experiment 1, participant interviewers (n = 52) administered target-absent photo lineups to participant witnesses (n = 52). The interviewers did not view the simulated crime, but were told the thief's position in the lineup. In every instance this information was false (we used a target-absent lineup). A one-way ANOVA revealed that eyewitness identification confidence was malleable as a function of interviewers' beliefs about the thief's identity. In Experiment 2, participant jurors (n = 80) viewed 40 testimonies of Experiment 1 witnesses (2 participants viewed each testimony). Participant jurors judged all participant witnesses as equally credible despite their varying levels of postidentification confidence.
Garrioch
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Department of Psychology, University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. garrioch@uvic.ca
Brimacombe
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CA
D000704:Analysis of Variance; D003415:Crime; D006801:Humans; D007407:Interviews as Topic; D011939:Mental Recall; D015999:Multivariate Analysis; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D012054:Reinforcement, Psychology; D012938:Social Perception