Judging memory: strong verbal confidence and lineup context influence inferences about eyewitnesses

ABSTRACT

Recent research demonstrated that people readily integrate contextual information when interpreting eyewitnesses’ verbal expressions of confidence. Identifications justified by memory for a facial feature that appeared not to discriminate between lineup members reduced mock jurors’ judgments of perceived eyewitness confidence, but seemingly discriminative justifications were rated similarly to statements mentioning confidence alone. This suggests that participants may assume confident witnesses already have a good basis for their identification. In Experiment 1, participants rated the extent to which various factors influenced witness confidence. In Experiment 2, participants made judgments about the presumed witnessing and retrieval conditions (e.g. amount of attention to the perpetrator) for statements that varied with respect to the degree of witness confidence, type of justification and feature discriminability of the suspect. Results suggest that people believe that confident identifications are the product of relatively favorable conditions, although these inferences are influenced by the lineup context. These beliefs have the potential to impact how jurors assess the credibility of eyewitnesses. Furthermore, our findings have implications for ways of reducing bias when jurors evaluate eyewitness identification evidence.

KEYWORDS:

• Eyewitness
• confidence statements
• perceived diagnosticity account
• jury decision-making
• featural justification

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Not all Biggers criteria are included in the Wells and Bradfield (1998) questionnaire. Specifically, the ‘accuracy of description’ is not typically included.