scholarly journals Guilty or innocent? About the role of choice blindness and own-race bias in eyewitness identifications

MaRBLe ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iris Van Sambeek ◽  
Inge Verheggen
Keyword(s):  
Race Bias ◽  
Choice Blindness ◽  
Eyewitness Identifications

The regulation of explicit and implicit race bias: The role of motivations to respond without prejudice.

2002 ◽  
Vol 82 (5) ◽  
pp. 835-848 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia G. Devine ◽  
E. Ashby Plant ◽  
David M. Amodio ◽  
Eddie Harmon-Jones ◽  
Stephanie L. Vance
Keyword(s):  
Race Bias

The role of categorization and ambiguity in the own-race bias

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristin J. M. Bellanca ◽  
Nalini Ambady
Keyword(s):  
Race Bias

Black and White: The Role of Color Bias in Implicit Race Bias

2006 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aaron Smith–McLallen ◽  
Blair T. Johnson ◽  
John F. Dovidio ◽  
Adam R. Pearson
Keyword(s):  
Race Bias ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Color Bias

scholarly journals Active exploration of faces in police lineups increases discrimination accuracy

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Fay Colloff ◽  
Heather D Flowe ◽  
Harriet M J Smith ◽  
Travis Morgan Seale-Carlisle ◽  
Christian A. Meissner ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Basic Science ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Policy Issue ◽  
Discrimination Accuracy ◽  
Race Bias ◽  
The World ◽  
Police Lineup ◽  
Lineup Procedure ◽  
Eyewitness Identifications ◽  
Active Exploration

Eyewitness identifications play a key role in the justice system, but eyewitnesses make errors, often with profound consequences. Errors are more likely when the witness is of a different race to the suspect, due to a phenomenon called the Own Race Bias (ORB). ORB is characterized as an encoding-based deficit, but has been predominantly tested using static photographs of people facing the camera. We used findings from basic science and innovative technologies to develop and test whether a novel interactive lineup procedure, wherein witnesses can rotate and dynamically view the lineup faces from different angles, improves witness discrimination accuracy and attenuates the ORB, compared to the most widely used procedure in laboratories and police forces around the world—the static frontal-pose photo lineup. No novel procedure has previously been shown to improve witness discrimination accuracy. In Experiment 1, participants (N=220) identified own-race or other-race culprits from sequentially presented interactive lineups or static frontal-pose photo lineups. In Experiment 2, participants (N=8,507) identified own-race or other-race culprits from interactive lineups that were either presented sequentially, simultaneously wherein the faces could be moved independently, or simultaneously wherein the faces moved jointly into the same angle. Interactive lineups enhanced witnesses’ discriminability compared to static lineups, especially when they were presented simultaneously, for both own-race and other-race identifications. Our findings suggest that ORB is an encoding-based phenomenon, and exemplify how basic science can be used to address the important applied policy issue on how best to conduct a police lineup and reduce eyewitness errors.

scholarly journals The Role of Estimator Variables in Eyewitness Identification

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolyn Semmler ◽  
John Cameron Dunn ◽  
Laura Mickes ◽  
John Wixted
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Retention Interval ◽  
Recognition Memory ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Eyewitness Identification ◽  
High Confidence ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Lower Confidence ◽  
Eyewitness Identifications

Estimator variables are factors that can affect the accuracy of eyewitness identifications but that are outside of the control of the criminal justice system. Examples include (1) the duration of exposure to the perpetrator, (2) the passage of time between the crime and the identification (retention interval), (3) the distance between the witness and the perpetrator at the time of the crime. Suboptimal estimator variables (e.g., long distance) have long been thought to reduce the reliability of eyewitness identifications (IDs), but recent evidence suggests that this is not true of IDs made with high confidence and may or may not be true of IDs made with lower confidence. The evidence suggests that while suboptimal estimator variables decrease discriminability (i.e., the ability to distinguish innocent from guilty suspects), they do not decrease the reliability of IDs made with high confidence. Such findings are inconsistent with the longstanding “optimality hypothesis” and therefore require a new theoretical framework. Here, we propose that a signal-detection-based likelihood ratio account – which has long been a mainstay of basic theories of recognition memory – naturally accounts for these findings.

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