New Insights on Expert Opinion About Eyewitness Memory Research.

Experimental psychologists investigating eyewitness memory have periodically gathered their thoughts on a variety of eyewitness memory phenomena. Courts and other stakeholders of eyewitness research rely on the expert opinions reflected in these surveys to make informed decisions. However, the last survey of this sort was published more than 20 years ago, and the science of eyewitness memory has developed since that time. Stakeholders need a current database of expert opinions to make informed decisions. In this article, we provide that update. We surveyed 76 scientists for their opinions on eyewitness memory phenomena. We compared these current expert opinions to expert opinions from the past several decades. We found that experts today share many of the same opinions as experts in the past and have more nuanced thoughts about two issues. Experts in the past endorsed the idea that confidence is weakly related to accuracy, but experts today acknowledge the potential diagnostic value of initial confidence collected from a properly administered lineup. In addition, experts in the past may have favored sequential over simultaneous lineup presentation, but experts today are divided on this issue. We believe this new survey will prove useful to the court and to other stakeholders of eyewitness research.

Eyewitness confidence and decision time reflect identification accuracy in actual police lineups.

OBJECTIVE: Although there are many lab-based studies demonstrating the utility of confidence and decision time as indicators of eyewitness accuracy, there is almost no research on how well these variables function for lineups in the real world. In two experiments, we examined confidence and decision time associated with real lineups that had been conducted using research-based recommendations. HYPOTHESES: We expected that how confident an eyewitness sounded and how quickly that eyewitness made their identification would be associated with whether that eyewitness identified a suspect or a filler. We also hypothesized that people's interpretations of eyewitness confidence could be easily influenced by additional, biasing information. METHOD: Using audio recordings of these lineups, we examined (a) participants' subjective ratings of how confident an eyewitness sounded at the time of the identification and (b) objective data regarding how quickly the eyewitness made the identification decision. We also manipulated what additional information, if any, participants received in Experiment 2. RESULTS: In both experiments, decision time and confidence predicted whether the eyewitnesses identified the suspect or a known-innocent filler, and when decision time and confidence diverged, it is likely that the eyewitness identified a filler. In Experiment 2, we found that people's interpretations of eyewitness's confidence statements could be biased. When observers believed that the witness picked a filler rather than a suspect, or vice versa, this changed how confident they thought the witness sounded. CONCLUSIONS: Confidence and decision time should both be collected when administering real lineups, but objective decision time data may be the most useful because people's perceptions of confidence are easily altered. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

A practical tool for information management in forensic decisions: Using Linear Sequential Unmasking-Expanded (LSU-E) in casework.

Forensic analysts often receive information from a multitude of sources. Empirical work clearly demonstrates that biasing information can affect analysts' decisions, and that the order in which task-relevant information is received impacts human cognition and decision-making. Linear Sequential Unmasking (LSU; Dror et al., 2015) and LSU-Expanded (LSU-E; Dror & Kukucka, 2021) are examples of research-based procedural frameworks to guide laboratories' and analysts' consideration and evaluation of case information. These frameworks identify parameters-such as objectivity, relevance, and biasing power-to prioritize and optimally sequence information for forensic analyses. Moreover, the LSU-E framework can be practically incorporated into any forensic discipline to improve decision quality by increasing the repeatability, reproducibility, and transparency of forensic analysts' decisions, as well as reduce bias. Future implementation of LSU and LSU-E in actual forensic casework can be facilitated by concrete guidance. We present here a practical worksheet designed to bridge the gap between research and practice by facilitating the implementation of LSU-E.

Match me if you can: Evidence for a domain-general visual comparison ability.

Visual comparison-comparing visual stimuli (e.g., fingerprints) side by side and determining whether they originate from the same or different source (i.e., "match")-is a complex discrimination task involving many cognitive and perceptual processes. Despite the real-world consequences of this task, which is often conducted by forensic scientists, little is understood about the psychological processes underpinning this ability. There are substantial individual differences in visual comparison accuracy amongst both professionals and novices. The source of this variation is unknown, but may reflect a domain-general and naturally varying perceptual ability. Here, we investigate this by comparing individual differences (N = 248 across two studies) in four visual comparison domains: faces, fingerprints, firearms, and artificial prints. Accuracy on all comparison tasks was significantly correlated and accounted for a substantial portion of variance (e.g., 42% in Exp. 1) in performance across all tasks. Importantly, this relationship cannot be attributed to participants' intrinsic motivation or skill in other visual-perceptual tasks (visual search and visual statistical learning). This paper provides novel evidence of a reliable, domain-general visual comparison ability.

Mistaken eyewitness identification rates increase when either witnessing or testing conditions get worse.

We examined how giving eyewitnesses a weak recognition experience impacts their identification decisions. In 2 experiments we forced a weak recognition experience for lineups by impairing either encoding or retrieval conditions. In Experiment 1 (n = 245), undergraduate participants were randomly assigned to watch either a clear or a degraded culprit video and then viewed either a culprit-present or culprit-removed lineup identification procedure. In Experiment 2 (n = 227), all participants watched the same clear culprit video but were then randomly assigned to either view a clear or noise-degraded lineup procedure. Half of the participants viewed a culprit-present lineup procedure and the remaining participants viewed a culprit-removed lineup procedure. Not surprisingly, degrading either encoding or retrieval conditions led to a sharp drop in culprit identifications. Critically, and as predicted, degrading either encoding or retrieval conditions also led to a sharp increase in the identification of innocent persons. These results suggest that when a lineup procedure gives a witness a weak match-to-memory experience, the witness will lower her criterion for making an affirmative identification decision. This pattern of results is troubling because it suggests that witnesses who encounter lineups that do not include the culprit might have a tendency to use a lower criterion for identification than do witnesses who encounter lineups that actually include the culprit. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Do measures of country-level safety predict individual-level health outcomes?

Health is not only a result of biological conditions, but of psychological, economic, and social circumstances. Both proximal factors, which impact daily life, and distal factors, which are further removed from everyday life, can influence a person's wellbeing. However, traditionally these distal factors have been overlooked in public discourse and government policy. OBJECTIVE: In the present study we examined whether measures of country-level safety predict the health of their residents. Additionally, we examined whether socioeconomic status (SES; approximated by income) interacts with other proximal factors to predict health. METHODS: Participants were 81,415 individuals residing in 58 countries. Multilevel modeling was used to determine the influence of distal and proximal factors on health. RESULTS: Findings indicated that both country-level safety and SES predict health regardless of the country of residence. Additionally, SES interacted with other proximal variables (e.g., life satisfaction and access to food) to predict health. CONCLUSIONS: In addition to everyday living conditions, health is contingent upon circumstances that do not directly impact daily life. This indicates that preventive measures are needed to secure the health of individuals impacted not only by negative proximal factors, but negative distal factors as well. In light of these findings, more translational research is needed to highlight the importance of the biopsychosocial model of health to both policymakers and the public. In this article, we suggest two research avenues relating to country-level safety that could provide specific recommendations for policy change.

The MTurkification of Social and Personality Psychology.

The potential role of brief online studies in changing the types of research and theories likely to evolve is examined in the context of earlier changes in theory and methods in social and personality psychology, changes that favored low-difficulty, high-volume studies. An evolutionary metaphor suggests that the current publication environment of social and personality psychology is a highly competitive one, and that academic survival and reproduction processes (getting a job, tenure/promotion, grants, awards, good graduate students) can result in the extinction of important research domains. Tracking the prevalence of brief online studies, exemplified by studies using Amazon Mechanical Turk, in three top journals ( Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology) reveals a dramatic increase in their frequency and proportion. Implications, suggestions, and questions concerning this trend for the field and questions for its practitioners are discussed.

In the real world, people prefer their last whisky when tasting options in a long sequence.

When people in laboratory studies sample products in a sequence, they tend to prefer options presented first and last. To what extent do these primacy and recency effects carry over to real-world settings where numerous sources of information determine preferences? To investigate this question, we coded archival data from 136 actual whisky tastings each featuring seven whiskies. We analyzed people's ratings of whiskies featured at different serial positions in the tastings. We found a recency effect: people gave their highest rating to whiskies in the last position, and voted the last whisky as their favorite more frequently. This recency effect persisted when we controlled for the counter explanation that whiskies with higher alcohol content tended to occupy later serial positions. The recency effect also persisted when we controlled for the age of the whiskies. Taken together, our findings suggest that the order of presentation matters in real-world settings, closely resembling what happens in laboratory settings with longer sequences of options.

Fillers can help control for contextual bias in forensic comparison tasks.

Forensic examiners are often exposed to contextual information that can bias their conclusions about evidence samples (e.g., fingerprints, fibers, tool marks). We tested the recently proposed filler-control method for moderating the biasing effects of contextual information for forensic comparisons. Borrowing from an analogy to eyewitness lineups versus showups, the filler-control method embeds a suspect's sample among known-innocent samples rather than the standard practice of presenting the analyst with only the suspect's sample for comparison. Our test of the filler-control method used fingerprints. After brief training, 234 participants compared eight sets of fingerprints in which suspect prints either matched the crime print or not, the prints were high or low in ambiguity, there was or was not contextual information suggesting there should be a match, and the suspect print was either embedded among filler prints or presented alone. Although the filler-control procedure reduced both hits and false alarms, the filler-control procedure produced better results overall as measured by d' analyses on suspect samples. These findings suggest the filler-control procedure should be considered for use in everyday forensic examination judgments, particularly when the error rate for a technique is unknown, or the risk of contextual bias is obvious, such as when examiners are called to make verification decisions. (PsycINFO Database Record

People with easier to pronounce names promote truthiness of claims.

When people make judgments about the truth of a claim, related but nonprobative information rapidly leads them to believe the claim--an effect called "truthiness". Would the pronounceability of others' names also influence the truthiness of claims attributed to them? We replicated previous work by asking subjects to evaluate people's names on a positive dimension, and extended that work by asking subjects to rate those names on negative dimensions. Then we addressed a novel theoretical issue by asking subjects to read that same list of names, and judge the truth of claims attributed to them. Across all experiments, easily pronounced names trumped difficult names. Moreover, the effect of pronounceability produced truthiness for claims attributed to those names. Our findings are a new instantiation of truthiness, and extend research on the truth effect as well as persuasion by showing that subjective, tangential properties such as ease of processing can matter when people evaluate information attributed to a source.