System variables in eyewitness identification: Control experiments and photospread evaluation

Abstract

An incident was staged in front of approximately 140 college students. Three months later, 48 of them tried to identify the person of the incident (the target) in a nine-person photospread (Experiment 1). Assisted with a verbal description of the target, 77 less confident students similarly tried to identify him (Experiment 2). Additionally, 69 students from another class tried to choose the target with the verbal description only (Experiment 3: a mock-witness control experiment). Results of Experiment 1 showed that although more than half of the participants correctly identified the target, a similarly high proportion of control participants falsely identified a specific foil as the target. In the three experiments, correct and false identification patterns were similar, and the variables of target presence and distracter similarity independently affected probability estimates for selected photographs to be the target's. The implications for actual eyewitness identification are discussed. © 1996 Japanese Psychological Association. Published by Blackwell Publishers Ltd.