NCJ Number
159165
Journal
Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology Volume: 10 Issue: 3 Dated: (1995) Pages: 31-34
Date Published
1995
Length
4 pages
Annotation
This study assessed how white and Asian eyewitnesses would describe a criminal perpetrator's height and weight.
Abstract
Subjects included 168 white and 199 Asian students who watched two videotapes portraying a robbery from an automated teller machine, perpetrated either by a white man or by an Asian man. Subjects also provided their own height and weight. The results showed that normative ethnic stereotypes influenced eyewitnesses' recollections of perpetrator height and weight across three experiments, in which the men's height and weight varied. The tall Asian man was recalled as being shorter, and the short Asian man was recalled as being taller than their actual heights and weights. The Asian witnesses gave lower estimates of height and weight than did the white witnesses for perpetrators from both ethnic groups. There were near-zero correlations between the witnesses' own height and weight and their estimations of perpetrator characteristics. The findings suggest that there are certain ethically related factors that could produce reliable discrepancies in eyewitness accounts. 3 tables and 19 references