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Ronald Cotton went to prison for rape. The victim picked him from a lineup convinced she was accurate. She picked him again years later when his case was reopened. This second lineup included the actual rapist. After 11 years behind bars, Cotton was later exonerated by DNA evidence.
Experts say that the current lineup format pressures witnesses to identify a suspect, even when they lack confidence. So researchers are trying to improve the accuracy of such identifications.
One recent study had more than 900 participants watch a short film of a staged? crime. Up to a week after watching the film, the viewers looked at photos of suspects one at a time, and rated how confident they were about each one’s guilt.
Half of the participants could take as long as they wanted to look at the photos. The other half had to decide within a few seconds. And the fast group was up to 66 percent more accurate. The study is in the Journal of Psychological Science.
Strong memories are accessed more quickly than weak memories, which may explain why choosing fast tends to mean choosing right. Another factor that’s putting the standard police lineup itself on trial.
—Christie Nicholson
[The above text is a transcript of this podcast.]
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7 Comments
Add CommentI'm sorry, but I have to disagree with your reasoning. Many people, when faced with abhorrent circumstance unconsciously repress the memory of the face as a form of denial. Also, for many, looking at their rapist's face is in itself an abhorrent act, as it bluntly includes this person into a very personal part of the psyche. These feelings can be very hard to overcome, especially when they have had time to set in, so it is best to approach the subject as early as possible.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think it would be extremely helpful in some circumstances to admit the likelihood of such feelings without judgement while impressing the necessity to prevent further suffering. Rape, to the victim, is about the possibility of privacy on any level as much as anything else.
Any data to go with those fries ma'am? Percentages are as worthless here as they are in medical studies. Seriously though, if 3 out of 100 people in the control group got it right and 5 out of 100 in the fast group got it right, that is a 66% increase, but still means 95% are still getting it wrong. This argument has been settled, eye witness accounts are loved by police and prosecutors and any decent behavioral scientist or neuroscientist knows they are worthless. How many studies need be done showing black people cannot be identified by white people before the criminal justice system quits asking racist grandmas to quit making ID's. I'll bet these are so bad that the average college student who hooks up on spring break couldn't pick out his one nighter a week later. Eye witnesses are unreliable, end of story. if they weren't, David Cooperfield and Chris Angle would be out of jobs.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@ jbairddo
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes, eyewitness testimony is known to have terrible accuracy under certain conditions and yet inspire great and unwarranted confidence in jurors. You also make a very good point about wanting to see the accuracy of this method in absolute terms rather than just compared to the usual method.
Still, in uncovering the truth, we are forced to use data collection methods with low signal-to-noise ratios. (Consider the detection of planets around distant stars.) If classification accuracy in this common procedure can be improved by 20 to 30 percent, that's nothing to sneeze at.
The authors and others are fortunately hard at work on the problem of how to get the most accurate information out of a group of witnesses.
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/having-to-make-quick-decisions-helps-witnesses-identify-the-bad-guy-in-a-lineup.html
http://www.psychology.iastate.edu/~glwells/Wells_articles_pdf/10_to_12_Second_Rule.pdf
http://www.flinders.edu.au/sabs/psychology/our-people/staff/neil-brewer.cfm
I‘m kinda agree with that. Intuition is really great in some occasions, for example, tests and choosing the commidies.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI‘m kinda agree with that. Intuition is really great in some occasions, for example, tests and choosing the commidies.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI‘m kinda agree with that. Intuition is really great in some occasions, for example, tests and choosing the commidies.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisActually, the article is contradicting itself.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt claims "current lineup format pressures witnesses to identify a suspect, even when they lack confidence". And this supposedly produces a string of false identifications. The implication is thatm if someone is not allowed the time to cme to a full certainty as to who they are identifying, their identificartion can be, maybe even will likely be, wrong. On the other hand, it claims that, in the "experiment", some subjects could take as long as they want to make an identification, while another group had to make a decision quickly. And the "fast group" was up to 66% more accurate.
But that means that the group that was literally pressured to make a quick decision could be more accurate!
So what is the article saying?
The fact is theat there is an overt attempt on the part of conspiratorial "psychological" "sciences" to completely overturn the eyewitness system, to allow criminals to walk free! "Professor" Gary Wells goes the other way, saying witnesses should be forced to stare at photographs individually for ten minutes or more until they are sure it is or is not the person they saw! This causes many people either to see details they didn't see in their cursory view of the crime or simply to become bored and opt out. Either way,they fail to make any kind of identification at all. And, if you don't make any idnetification, you can't make a wrong one! And, in the depraved "statistics" used in Wells' method, a failure to make a wrong identification was tallied as having made the right one! That's why "news" articles on Wells' techniques will have headlines that read that he "increases the number of correct identifications", while the article itself will reveal he only reduces the number of wrong ones! And he "reduces the number of wrong identifications" only by making the identification process so tedious and miserable that no eyewitness goes through it all the way!