Who do you believe? Assessing student and community member perceptions of bystander and victim witnesses

ABSTRACT

Eyewitness identifications provide critical evidence as they are often persuasive to jurors, but documented misidentifications have led to wrongful convictions . Researchers have examined how jurors evaluate multiple eyewitnesses, but not different types of eyewitnesses, such as bystanders and victims. Additionally, none of this research has examined jurors’ ability to evaluate bystander and victim identifications that vary in quality. Two studies examined student and community members’ perceptions of bystander and victim witnesses. Study 1 participants read about a good or poor-quality identification made by a bystander or victim. Study 2 participants read about both bystander and victim identifications that varied in quality. Both studies found jurors were sensitive to identification quality as demonstrated by a variety of legal decisions, including verdict, though the quality of a second identification in Study 2 did not change any legal decisions. Multiple differences between student and community member samples emerged across both studies suggesting that community members are more likely to trust witnesses and convict. Reliance on student samples may overestimate jurors’ ability to evaluate multiple eyewitnesses and underestimate the likelihood of conviction based on flawed eyewitness evidence.

KEYWORDS:

• Bystander
• eyewitness
• eyewitness identification
• juror decision making
• sample differences

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Qualtrics utilizes panel providers to recruit participants from traditional market research panels and social media. Participants are randomly selected for participation in studies for which they qualify from a large pool of over 13 million US participants. Panel providers verify each participant’s identity through a variety of procedures, such as digital fingerprinting. Participants are compensated based on their agreement with Qualtrics.

2 Stimulus materials are available via OSF: https://osf.io/63uve/?view_only=0bfc0b305d354f6db5302ac98d1c03d2.

3 The high percent of Hispanic students reflects the fact that data was collected from a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI).

4 The manipulations of witness type and identification quality as well as sample type were not entered as predictors in these regression models (see Table 3).

5 Stimulus materials are available via OSF: https://osf.io/63uve/?view_only=0bfc0b305d354f6db5302ac98d1c03d2.

6 The manipulations of bystander and victim identification quality as well as sample type were not entered as predictors in these regression models (see Table 6).

7 Juror decision-making studies focused on racial differences often manipulate the race of the defendant and measure juror race. Neither stimuli used in Study 1 or 2 explicitly mentioned the race of any of the trial participants (defendant, witnesses).

8 The first author reviewed 10% of the studies included in the meta-analysis.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Qualtrics Behavioral Research Grant.