What individual differences impact eyewitness identification performance?

Abstract

The eyewitness’ memory of a crime is used to identify the perpetrator from a lineup. A lineup contains the police suspect (who is innocent or guilty) and fillers (people who are known to be innocent). Two kinds of performance accuracy are considered: discriminability and reliability. Discriminability is the ability to distinguish the guilty suspect from the innocent suspect. Reliability is the likelihood that the identified suspect is the perpetrator. Until now, there have been no investigations of individual factors, such as age, sex, and race, on discriminability and reliability. In this study, women vs men, young vs middle-aged vs. older adults, and different races are compared. Data from 17 published articles were analysed. In terms of discriminability, middle-aged adults outperform younger adults who outperform older adults. There were no differences between men and women. Participants who were of the same race as the suspect outperformed those whose race differed. In terms of reliability, there was a relationship between confidence and accuracy. That is, high confidence identifications were higher in accuracy than lower confidence identifications. Older adults perform worse than other two groups within medium and high confidence levels. There were no differences in reliability between men and women or across races. These results offer insights into individual differences and eyewitness identification performance to inform researchers, the police, judges, and jurors.

Date of Award	12 May 2022
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bristol
Supervisor	Laura B Mickes (Supervisor) & Nina Kazanina (Supervisor)