Eyewitness identification of criminals is often mistaken, but a new, rapid-fire technique for asking people to finger culprits appears to improve accuracy, a study from Australia shows. (click below to read more)
Subjects saw short films of a crime, or of a more mundane event that, they were later told, involved a suspect in a nearby offense. Then the participants looked at photos for just three seconds each. They were asked to rate their confidence in the guilt of each person portrayed by using an 11-point scale—ranging from absolute certainty that they had fingered the culprit to absolute confidence that it was the wrong person.
Researchers processed the various ratings and compared them with a control group whose members had as much time as they liked. The rapid identifiers were 20% to 30% more accurate.
"Identifying the Bad Guy in a Lineup Using Confidence Judgments Under Deadline Pressure," Neil Brewer, Nathan Weber, David Wootton, D. Stephen Lindsay, Psychological Science (September)
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