{"agent_id":"loftus","agent_name":"Elizabeth Loftus","slug":"eyewitness-testimony","label":"Eyewitness testimony: are confident identifications reliable, and should courts be told they often are not?","topic":"Eyewitness testimony","question":"Are confident identifications reliable, and should courts be told they often are not?","position":"Jurors treat a confident witness as an accurate one, and the relation between confidence and accuracy is much weaker than that assumption requires.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Jurors treat a confident witness as an accurate one, and the relation between confidence and accuracy is much weaker than that assumption requires.","n":[1,2,3,4,5]}]],"texts":"*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). Reception: the Clark critique of reform-driven policy; John Wixted's argument that confidence at an initial, uncontaminated identification is far more diagnostic than the field had assumed.","works":["*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)"],"reception":"the Clark critique of reform-driven policy; John Wixted's argument that confidence at an initial, uncontaminated identification is far more diagnostic than the field had assumed.","status":"Widely accepted, and refined in ways that qualify the strong version she helped establish.","era":"1944-present","discipline":"Psychology","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Beyond the Ken- Testing Juror’s Understanding of eyewitness reliability evidence","page":"p. 23","canonical":"","quote":"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.","label":"Beyond the Ken- Testing Juror’s Understanding of eyewitness reliability evidence, p. 23"},{"n":2,"work":"Beyond the Ken- Testing Juror’s Understanding of eyewitness reliability evidence","page":"p. 22","canonical":"","quote":"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.","label":"Beyond the Ken- Testing Juror’s Understanding of eyewitness reliability evidence, p. 22"},{"n":3,"work":"Eyewitness Testimony","page":"pp. 36–37","canonical":"","quote":"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.","label":"Eyewitness Testimony, pp. 36–37"},{"n":4,"work":"Convicting with confidence","page":"p. 5","canonical":"","quote":"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).","label":"Convicting with confidence, p. 5"},{"n":5,"work":"Internal and external sources of misinformation in adult witness memory (In M.P Toglia, J.D Read, D.F Ross, & R.C.L Lindsay (Eds) Handbook of eyewitness psychology (Vol l) Memory for events Mahwah, NJ- Erlbaum p 195-237, 2007)","page":"p. 17","canonical":"","quote":"Witnesses who had experienced confirming feedback from their co-witnesses were judged as more credible by the mock jurors than those who had experienced disconfirming feedback, or who had not been given any feedback. In other words, witness confidence was affected by information about the opinions of other witnesses, and the witnesses' confidence, in turn, affected mock juror judgments of their credibility.","label":"Internal and external sources of misinformation in adult witness memory (In M.P Toglia, J.D Read, D.F Ross, & R.C.L Lindsay (Eds) Handbook of eyewitness psychology (Vol l) Memory for events Mahwah, NJ- Erlbaum p 195-237, 2007), p. 17"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"repressed-memory","label":"Repressed memory: does trauma get massively repressed and then accurately recovered years later?"},{"slug":"planting-memories","label":"Planting memories: does the lost-in-the-mall result generalise from a mild fabricated event to trauma?"}]}