title: Is manipulative intent necessary to mitigate the eyewitness post-identification feedback effect?
abstract: Feedback suggestive of mistaken eyewitnesses claiming that they identified the correct person leads to distorted retrospective judgments of certainty, view, and other testimony-relevant measures. This feedback effect can be significantly mitigated if witnesses later learn that the feedback source did not know which lineup member was the correct person and had a manipulative intent (post-feedback suspicion manipulation). We replicated the post-feedback suspicion effect and used a mistake condition showing that the manipulative intent is not a necessary component, thereby ruling out reactance-type interpretations of the post-feedback suspicion effect. Some conditions included instructions to ensure relevant processing of the feedback before the post-feedback suspicion manipulations, but these processing instructions did not mitigate the effect. The results suggest that these retrospective judgments (e.g., certainty, attention, view) remain malleable as new information unfolds.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Iowa State University, West 112 Lagomarcino, Ames, IA 50011, USA. dslawson@iastate.edu
authors.forename: Deah S
authors.initials: DS
authors.lastname: Quinlivan
authors.forename: Gary L
authors.initials: GL
authors.lastname: Wells
authors.forename: Jeffrey S
authors.initials: JS
authors.lastname: Neuschatz
mesh_terms: D005246:Feedback; D006801:Humans; D033182:Intention; D007600:Judgment; D011939:Mental Recall; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D014796:Visual Perception