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The Dud Effect: Adding Highly Dissimilar Fillers Increases Confidence in Lineup Identifications

  • Original Article
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Law and Human Behavior

Abstract

Recent research in decision-making has demonstrated the “dud-alternative effect”—the tendency to become more confident that a chosen response option is correct if it is surrounded by implausible response options (Windschitl & Chambers, J Exp Psychol 30:198–215, 2004). This finding may be applicable to a lineup task: The presence of duds (i.e., highly dissimilar fillers) may increase a witness’s confidence that an identified (non-dud) lineup member is the criminal. Four studies (N = 665) demonstrate that the mere presence of highly dissimilar fillers inflates witnesses’ confidence in a mistaken identification (Studies 1–4), provides evidence that this confidence inflation is due to the duds inflating the perceived similarity of the other lineup members to the criminal (Studies 2, 3), and delineates some conditions under which the effect holds (Studies 3, 4). The addition of highly dissimilar lineup members, far from being inert, as is often implicitly assumed, can bias witnesses’ confidence reports.

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Notes

  1. Consistent with the judgment and decision making literature, we use the term normative to refer to processes or judgments that are considered to fit a rational model or align with formal proofs, such as probability theory.

  2. Of course, the inclusion of duds could also theoretically increase witness confidence in a correct identification as well; however, the general point to be made is that dud-induced confidence inflation is a distortion of a witness’s ‘true’ confidence, since it derives from a source considered not relevant to the judgment.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, DM 256, Florida International University, Miami, FL, 33199, USA

    Steve D. Charman & Stephen W. Joy

  2. Department of Psychology, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, USA

    Gary L. Wells

Authors
  1. Steve D. Charman
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  2. Gary L. Wells
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  3. Stephen W. Joy
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Steve D. Charman.

Appendices

Appendix A

Dud lineup and actual perpetrator from Experiments 1 and 2. Note that the non-dud version of this lineup consisted of only lineup members 2 and 5.

figure a

Appendix B

Dud lineup and actual perpetrator from Experiment 3. Note that the non-dud lineup consisted of only lineup members 2 and 5.

figure b

Appendix C

Dud lineups and actual perpetrator from Experiment 4. Note that the non-dud version of the lineups consisted of lineup members 2 and 5.

figure c
figure d

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Charman, S.D., Wells, G.L. & Joy, S.W. The Dud Effect: Adding Highly Dissimilar Fillers Increases Confidence in Lineup Identifications. Law Hum Behav 35, 479–500 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10979-010-9261-1

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