title: Estimating the reliability of eyewitness identifications from police lineups.
abstract: Laboratory-based mock crime studies have often been interpreted to mean that (i) eyewitness confidence in an identification made from a lineup is a weak indicator of accuracy and (ii) sequential lineups are diagnostically superior to traditional simultaneous lineups. Largely as a result, juries are increasingly encouraged to disregard eyewitness confidence, and up to 30% of law enforcement agencies in the United States have adopted the sequential procedure. We conducted a field study of actual eyewitnesses who were assigned to simultaneous or sequential photo lineups in the Houston Police Department over a 1-y period. Identifications were made using a three-point confidence scale, and a signal detection model was used to analyze and interpret the results. Our findings suggest that (i) confidence in an eyewitness identification from a fair lineup is a highly reliable indicator of accuracy and (ii) if there is any difference in diagnostic accuracy between the two lineup formats, it likely favors the simultaneous procedure.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093; jwixted@ucsd.edu.
authors.forename: John T
authors.initials: JT
authors.lastname: Wixted
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham TW20 0EX, United Kingdom;
authors.forename: Laura
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Mickes
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA 5005, Australia;
authors.forename: John C
authors.initials: JC
authors.lastname: Dunn
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of California, Riverside, CA 92521;
authors.forename: Steven E
authors.initials: SE
authors.lastname: Clark
authors.affiliation: Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology, Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, TX 77341.
authors.forename: William
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Wells
mesh_terms: D019992:Databases as Topic; D006801:Humans; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D016495:Police; D011336:Probability; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted
keywords: confidence–accuracy relationship; eyewitness identification; simultaneous vs. sequential lineups