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Updated: Jun 23, 2026

Holistic Facial Composite Creation and Subsequent Video Line-up Eyewitness Identification Paradigm
Published on: December 24, 2015
Is manipulative intent necessary to mitigate the eyewitness post-identification feedback effect?
Deah S Quinlivan1, Gary L Wells, Jeffrey S Neuschatz
1Department of Psychology, Iowa State University, West 112 Lagomarcino, Ames, IA 50011, USA. dslawson@iastate.edu
Abstract:
Feedback suggestive of mistaken eyewitnesses claiming that they identified the correct person leads to distorted retrospective judgments of certainty, view, and other testimony-relevant measures. This feedback effect can be significantly mitigated if witnesses later learn that the feedback source did not know which lineup member was the correct person and had a manipulative intent (post-feedback suspicion manipulation). We replicated the post-feedback suspicion effect and used a mistake condition showing that the manipulative intent is not a necessary component, thereby ruling out reactance-type interpretations of the post-feedback suspicion effect. Some conditions included instructions to ensure relevant processing of the feedback before the post-feedback suspicion manipulations, but these processing instructions did not mitigate the effect. The results suggest that these retrospective judgments (e.g., certainty, attention, view) remain malleable as new information unfolds.
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