Practical Issues in Eyewitness Research (From Impact of Social Psychology on Procedural Justice, P 109-134, 1986, Martin F Kaplan, ed. - See NCJ-101784)

• NCJ Number: 101785
• Author(s): G L Wells; E F Wright
• Date Published: 1986
• Length: 26 pages
• Sale Source: Charles C. Thomas
• Publication Type: Report (Study/Research)
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America
• Note: *This document is currently unavailable from NCJRS.

Annotation

This paper presents an overview of psychological research findings on eyewitness testimony and analyzes two current methods for applying this knowledge to improve the justice system.

Abstract

Research findings indicate that eyewitness memory is distorted through seemingly trivial variations in question wording, that the accuracy of eyewitness identifications is strongly related to the instructions and structure of lineups and picture arrays, and that eyewitness certainty has little relationship to eyewitness identification accuracy. Two general approaches for applying these findings to the justice system's improvement are expert testimony by psychologists and system intervention in the collection of eyewitness evidence. Both approaches have problems. Expert testimony has suffered in part from being descriptive rather than proscriptive. System intervention has suffered from the lack of incentive for police to improve their procedures. An integration of the expert testimony and system approaches can make expert testimony proscriptive and introduce incentives for police to improve their eyewitness evidence collection procedures. 63 references. (Author summary modifed)