Eyewitness testimony: are confident identifications reliable, and should courts be told they often are not?

Elizabeth Loftus, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Jurors treat a confident witness as an accurate one, and the relation between confidence and accuracy is much weaker than that assumption requires.12345

Sources

  1. Even if survey respondents who said that an identification of a confident witness is "equally reliable" as one by a less confident witness are treated as having correctly understood this phenomenon, 59% of the respondents—more than half of those on any given jury—demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of the confidence accuracy relationship.
    Beyond the Ken- Testing Juror’s Understanding of eyewitness reliability evidence, p. 23
  2. Thus, the longer an eyewitness has to observe a particular face, the more accurate her identification becomes. Although jurors understand this principle as a matter of common sense, they do not also understand the unreliability of witnesses' subjective time estimates. Often, the only piece of information a juror has about the length of exposure time is the witness' estimate.
    Beyond the Ken- Testing Juror’s Understanding of eyewitness reliability evidence, p. 22
  3. The study was conducted in two phases, the crime phase and the trial phase. During the crime phase, subjects (three in each session) sat for a few minutes, whereupon a "thief" entered, posing as a co-participant. She soon "discovered" a calculator that had apparently been left by a previous subject. After examining the calculator, she stated that she wanted it, put it in her purse, and left the experimental room.
    Eyewitness Testimony, pp. 19–20
  4. The atmosphere variation was powerful in affecting the witness's feelings about the interview, and so its failure to influence performance is rather persuasive. In sum, it appears that the credibility or status of an interviewer can influence how successful the interview is in terms of accuracy and completeness, but whether the interviewer is a nice guy or not seems to make very little difference.
    Eyewitness Testimony, p. 100
  5. Furthermore, research suggests confidence alone is not the most indicative of accuracy (Dodson, 2020). Instead, the speed with which an eyewitness identifies a suspect from a lineup is also of extreme value (within a few seconds is key).
    Convicting with confidence, p. 5

Where the argument is made

  • Eyewitness Testimony (Harvard, 1979)
  • Some facts about weapon focus (Law and Human Behavior, 1987)
  • Do jurors share a common understanding concerning eyewitness behavior? with Deffenbacher (1982)
  • Eyewitness Science (Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 2018)

How the argument was received

Widely accepted, and refined in ways that qualify the strong version she helped establish.