Campus Units
Psychology
Document Type
Article
Publication Version
Accepted Manuscript
Publication Date
2017
Journal or Book Title
Law and Human Behavior
Volume
43
Issue
3
First Page
215
Last Page
226
DOI
10.1037/lhb0000284
Abstract
We tested the proposition that when eyewitnesses find it difficult to recognize a suspect (as in a culprit-absent showup), eyewitnesses accept a weaker match to memory for making an identification. We tie this proposition to the basic recognition memory literature, which shows people use lower decision criteria when recognition is made difficult so as to not miss their chance of getting a hit on the target. We randomly assigned participant–witnesses (N = 610) to a condition in which they were told that if they did not believe the suspect was the culprit, they would have additional opportunities to make an identification later (additional-opportunities instruction). We fully crossed this instruction with the standard admonition (i.e., the culprit may or may not be present) and with the presence or absence of the culprit in a showup identification procedure. The standard admonition had no impact on eyewitness decision-making; however, the additional-opportunities instruction reduced innocent-suspect identifications (from 33% to 15%) to a greater extent than culprit identifications (57% to 51%). The additional-opportunities instruction yielded a better tradeoff between culprit and innocent-suspect identifications as indicated by binary logistic regression and receiver operator characteristic (ROC) analyses.
Copyright Owner
American Psychological Association
Copyright Date
2018
Language
en
File Format
application/pdf
Recommended Citation
Smith, Andrew M.; Wells, Gary L.; Lindsay, R. C. L.; and Myerson, Tiffany, "Eyewitness identification performance on showups improves with an additional-opportunities instruction: Evidence for present–absent criteria discrepancy" (2017). Psychology Publications. 63.
https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/psychology_pubs/63
Included in
Applied Behavior Analysis Commons, Criminology and Criminal Justice Commons, Law and Psychology Commons, Theory and Philosophy Commons
Comments
©American Psychological Association, 2018. This paper is not the copy of record and may not exactly replicate the authoritative document published in the APA journal. Please do not copy or cite without author's permission. The final article is available, upon publication, at doi:10.1037/lhb0000284. Posted with permission.