Identifying the bad guy in a lineup using confidence judgments under deadline pressure

Area of Science:

• Psychology
• Forensic Science
• Cognitive Science

Background:

• Traditional eyewitness identification procedures frequently result in misidentifications.
• Both identifying innocent suspects and failing to identify the culprit are common errors.

Purpose of the Study:

• To test a novel deadline procedure as an alternative to traditional eyewitness identification.
• To compare the accuracy and informativeness of confidence judgments under a deadline versus traditional sequential lineups.

Main Methods:

• Three experiments were conducted with varying retention intervals (5 minutes to 1 week).
• Participants used a deadline procedure, making confidence judgments for each lineup member.
• A classification algorithm determined optimal confidence criteria for accuracy discrimination.

Main Results:

• The deadline procedure increased decision accuracy by 24% to 66% compared to traditional methods.
• Confidence profiles were more informative than identification decisions for assessing accuracy.
• Large confidence gaps between top choices strongly indicated accurate identification.

Conclusions:

• The deadline procedure offers a promising alternative to problematic traditional lineup methods.
• Confidence judgments under a deadline enhance eyewitness identification accuracy and reliability.
• This method could improve law enforcement's ability to correctly identify suspects.