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Eyewitness testimony
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Eyewitness testimony
Eyewitness testimony is the account a bystander or victim gives in the courtroom, describing what that person observed that occurred during the specific incident under investigation. Ideally this recollection of events is detailed; however, this is not always the case. This recollection is used as evidence to show what happened from a witness' point of view. Memory recall has been considered a credible source in the past but has recently come under attack as forensics can now support psychologists in their claim that memories and individual perceptions can be unreliable, manipulated, and biased. As a result of this, many countries, and states within the United States, are now attempting to make changes in how eyewitness testimony is presented in court. Eyewitness testimony is a specialized focus within cognitive psychology.
Psychologists have probed the reliability of eyewitness testimony since the beginning of the 20th century. One prominent pioneer was Hugo Münsterberg, whose controversial book On the Witness Stand (1908) demonstrated the fallibility of eyewitness accounts, but met with fierce criticism, particularly in legal circles. His ideas did, however, gain popularity with the public. Decades later, DNA testing would clear individuals convicted on the basis of errant eyewitness testimony. Studies by Scheck, Neufel, and Dwyer showed that many DNA-based exonerations involved eyewitness evidence.
In the 1970s and '80s, Bob Buckhout showed, inter alia, that eyewitness conditions can, within ethical and other constraints, be simulated on university campuses, and that large numbers of people can be mistaken.
In his study, "Nearly 2,000 witnesses can be wrong", Buckhout performed an experiment with 2,145 at-home viewers of a popular news broadcast. The television network played a 13-second clip of a mock robbery, produced by Buckhout. In the video, viewers watched a man in a hat run up behind a woman, knock her over, and take her purse. The perpetrator's face was only visible for about 3.5 seconds. The clip was followed by the announcer asking participants at home for cooperation in identifying the man who stole the purse. There was a lineup of six male suspects, each having a number associated with him. The people at home could call a number on their screen to report which suspect they believed was the perpetrator. The perpetrator was suspect number 2. Callers also had the option of reporting that they did not believe the perpetrator was in the lineup. Approximately equal contingents of participants chose suspects 1, 2, or 5, while the largest group of participants, about 25 percent, said they believed the perpetrator was not in the lineup. Even police precincts called in and reported the wrong man as the one they believed committed the crime. A key purpose of this experiment was aimed toward proving the need for better systems of getting suspect descriptions from eyewitnesses.
The question at hand is: What is there about an event that makes it so easy for eyewitness testimonies to be misremembered? As it pertains to witnessing crime in real time, “uniqueness is overshadowed by the conditions for observations”. The surprise or shock over the fact that a crime is happening puts the visceral experience of the event large, front and center of attention for a witness or a victim. However, this also has the effect of making it difficult for them to pay close attention to every material detail of the event; that is, their ability to remember any particular thing that potentially could be remembered will likely be diminished, because the ability to observe carefully, completely, accurately and objectively is handicapped by a number of factors constituent to the incident:
The eyewitness's viewing conditions greatly impacts their ability to encode features about the perpetrator or crime in general which ultimately impacts their ability to retrieve said information.
A person's memory can be influenced by things seen or heard after a crime has occurred. This distortion is known as the post-event misinformation effect After a crime occurs, and an eyewitness comes forward, law enforcement tries to gather as much information as they can, in order to avoid any influence that may come from the environment, such as the media. Many times, when the crime is surrounded by much publicity, an eyewitness may experience source misattribution. Source misattribution occurs when a witness is mistaken about where or when they have the memory from. If a witness identification of the source of their retrieved memory turns out to be mistaken, then the witness will be considered unreliable.[citation needed]
While some witnesses see the entirety of a crime happen in front of them, others only witness part of a crime. These latter witnesses are more likely to experience confirmation bias. Witness expectations are to blame for the distortion that may come from confirmation bias. For example, Lindholm and Christianson (1998) found that witnesses of a mock crime, who did not witness the whole crime, nevertheless testified to what they expected would have happened. These expectations are normally similar across individuals, due to the details of the environment.[citation needed]
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Eyewitness testimony
Eyewitness testimony is the account a bystander or victim gives in the courtroom, describing what that person observed that occurred during the specific incident under investigation. Ideally this recollection of events is detailed; however, this is not always the case. This recollection is used as evidence to show what happened from a witness' point of view. Memory recall has been considered a credible source in the past but has recently come under attack as forensics can now support psychologists in their claim that memories and individual perceptions can be unreliable, manipulated, and biased. As a result of this, many countries, and states within the United States, are now attempting to make changes in how eyewitness testimony is presented in court. Eyewitness testimony is a specialized focus within cognitive psychology.
Psychologists have probed the reliability of eyewitness testimony since the beginning of the 20th century. One prominent pioneer was Hugo Münsterberg, whose controversial book On the Witness Stand (1908) demonstrated the fallibility of eyewitness accounts, but met with fierce criticism, particularly in legal circles. His ideas did, however, gain popularity with the public. Decades later, DNA testing would clear individuals convicted on the basis of errant eyewitness testimony. Studies by Scheck, Neufel, and Dwyer showed that many DNA-based exonerations involved eyewitness evidence.
In the 1970s and '80s, Bob Buckhout showed, inter alia, that eyewitness conditions can, within ethical and other constraints, be simulated on university campuses, and that large numbers of people can be mistaken.
In his study, "Nearly 2,000 witnesses can be wrong", Buckhout performed an experiment with 2,145 at-home viewers of a popular news broadcast. The television network played a 13-second clip of a mock robbery, produced by Buckhout. In the video, viewers watched a man in a hat run up behind a woman, knock her over, and take her purse. The perpetrator's face was only visible for about 3.5 seconds. The clip was followed by the announcer asking participants at home for cooperation in identifying the man who stole the purse. There was a lineup of six male suspects, each having a number associated with him. The people at home could call a number on their screen to report which suspect they believed was the perpetrator. The perpetrator was suspect number 2. Callers also had the option of reporting that they did not believe the perpetrator was in the lineup. Approximately equal contingents of participants chose suspects 1, 2, or 5, while the largest group of participants, about 25 percent, said they believed the perpetrator was not in the lineup. Even police precincts called in and reported the wrong man as the one they believed committed the crime. A key purpose of this experiment was aimed toward proving the need for better systems of getting suspect descriptions from eyewitnesses.
The question at hand is: What is there about an event that makes it so easy for eyewitness testimonies to be misremembered? As it pertains to witnessing crime in real time, “uniqueness is overshadowed by the conditions for observations”. The surprise or shock over the fact that a crime is happening puts the visceral experience of the event large, front and center of attention for a witness or a victim. However, this also has the effect of making it difficult for them to pay close attention to every material detail of the event; that is, their ability to remember any particular thing that potentially could be remembered will likely be diminished, because the ability to observe carefully, completely, accurately and objectively is handicapped by a number of factors constituent to the incident:
The eyewitness's viewing conditions greatly impacts their ability to encode features about the perpetrator or crime in general which ultimately impacts their ability to retrieve said information.
A person's memory can be influenced by things seen or heard after a crime has occurred. This distortion is known as the post-event misinformation effect After a crime occurs, and an eyewitness comes forward, law enforcement tries to gather as much information as they can, in order to avoid any influence that may come from the environment, such as the media. Many times, when the crime is surrounded by much publicity, an eyewitness may experience source misattribution. Source misattribution occurs when a witness is mistaken about where or when they have the memory from. If a witness identification of the source of their retrieved memory turns out to be mistaken, then the witness will be considered unreliable.[citation needed]
While some witnesses see the entirety of a crime happen in front of them, others only witness part of a crime. These latter witnesses are more likely to experience confirmation bias. Witness expectations are to blame for the distortion that may come from confirmation bias. For example, Lindholm and Christianson (1998) found that witnesses of a mock crime, who did not witness the whole crime, nevertheless testified to what they expected would have happened. These expectations are normally similar across individuals, due to the details of the environment.[citation needed]