Is manipulative intent necessary to mitigate the eyewitness post-identification feedback effect?
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.
Quinlivan
Deah S
DS
Department of Psychology, Iowa State University, West 112 Lagomarcino, Ames, IA 50011, USA. dslawson@iastate.edu
Wells
Gary L
GL
Neuschatz
Jeffrey S
JS
D005246:Feedback; D006801:Humans; D033182:Intention; D007600:Judgment; D011939:Mental Recall; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D014796:Visual Perception