Psychologists in the eyewitness world

Over the past century, but especially over the past 20 years, psychological studies of eyewitness identification have been accumulating. Wells (1993, this issue) believes that the time is ripe to summarize the research on identification procedures, such as lineups and showups, that will minimize false identifications of innocent people and maximize accurate identifications of the guilty. Other experts in the field worry that there is still too big a leap from the laboratory work to the real world of crime. Identification research, many agree, has the potential for being one of the more useful arenas in which psychological science can make a difference in society.