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Regularities in Eyewitness Identification

  • Original Article
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Law and Human Behavior

Abstract

What do eyewitness identification experiments typically show? We address this question through a meta-analysis of 94 comparisons between target-present and target-absent lineups. The analyses showed that: (a) correct identifications and correct-nonidentifications were uncorrelated, (b) suspect identifications were more diagnostic with respect to the suspect’s guilt or innocence than any other response, (c) nonidentifications were diagnostic of the suspect’s innocence, (d) the diagnosticity of foil identifications depended on lineup composition, and (e) don’t know responses were nondiagnostic with respect to guilt or innocence. Results of diagnosticity analyses for simultaneous and sequential lineups varied for full-sample versus direct-comparison analyses. Diagnosticity patterns also varied as a function of lineup composition. Theoretical, forensic, and legal implications are discussed.

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Notes

  1. It is clear that the numbers of simultaneous and sequential lineups do not add to the total of 94. The reason is that we separated out a set of lineups that were presented in a manner that might be described as a hybrid of simultaneous and sequential procedures (Yarmey et al., 1996). Witnesses were presented with the photographs sequentially, but at the end of the sequence were allowed to go back through the photographs again. The authors noted that the use of this hybrid procedure was motivated by Canadian law at that time. The means for the hybrid procedure were as follows: In TP lineups, suspect, foil, and nonidentifications were: .390, .390, and .220, and in TA lineups: .193, .493, and .315.

  2. The modified Z is like the standard Z, but uses the deviations about the median (rather than the mean) as in the denominator. The advantage is that the median, as a measure of central tendency, is less influenced than the mean by the presence of the extreme score that one is trying to identify. The modified Z scores for the two scores we have identified as outliers were 3.04 (Lindsay & Wells, 1985) and 7.28 (Melara et al., 1989). The Lindsay and Wells result is lower than the 3.5 cutoff used by Iglewicz and Hoaglin (1993); however its large sample size gave it considerable weight, particularly in the Wells and Olson (2002) calculations.

  3. Simultaneous lineups in simultaneous-sequential comparisons were on average larger (6.8) than simultaneous lineups in studies without a sequential comparison (6.1), which would tend to reduce Susp/Susp+Foil for those studies (in opposition to the obtained results) An analysis only for studies where k = 6 showed the same pattern of results, but with only three cases for the simultaneous-with-sequential condition.

  4. Ebbesen and Konecni (1996) directed their criticism at the failure to distinguish between misses versus false alarms. Their use of the term false alarm includes identifications of foils in both TP and TA lineups, as well as identifications of innocent suspects in TA lineups. Our concern here is directed at errors in TP lineups versus TA lineups; however, the point is the same—that experts should not fail to distinguish between different categories of identification errors, as they are likely to be produced by different mechanisms, and are certainly to have different legal implications.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by National Science Foundation grant SES 0214373 awarded to Steven Clark. We wish to thank Brynn Nodarse for her assistance, and to all the reviewers for their very helpful comments and suggestions which improved the paper substantially.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Psychology Department, University of California, Riverside, CA, 92521, USA

    Steven E. Clark & Sherrie L. Davey

  2. California State University, Bakersfield, CA, USA

    Ryan T. Howell

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  1. Steven E. Clark
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Correspondence to Steven E. Clark.

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*Included in the meta-analysis.

Appendix

Appendix

Results from all 94 studies, suspect, foil, and nonidentification responses, for target-present and target-absent lineups are shown in Table A.1. An explanation of the various abbreviations is given in Table A.2.

Table 10 Table A.1 Identification response probabilities for 94 studies used in the meta-analysis
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Table 11 Table A.2 Key to abbreviations in Table A.1
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Clark, S.E., Howell, R.T. & Davey, S.L. Regularities in Eyewitness Identification. Law Hum Behav 32, 187–218 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10979-006-9082-4

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