Eyewitnesses may be focused on their own trial#
At least as important for the outcome of a legal trial is witnesses' verbal testimony. However, mistaken identification is not the only aspect of eyewitness memory of importance for the legal system.
Most research on eyewitness accuracy have focused on delineating accuracy in eyewitness identifications (i.e., picking out a suspect in a lineup see Wells et al., 2006 for an overview). It is therefore crucial that fact finders obtain the skill to separate correct from incorrect memories. However, the negative consequences that may follow from erroneous recall can be avoided if the error is detected. The fallibility of eyewitness evidence becomes strikingly clear by estimations that more than 70% of overturned wrongful convictions have involved eyewitness misidentifications (Innocence Project, 2021, see also Garrett, 2011). However, eyewitness evidence can be unreliable, as some witnesses lie (see DePaulo et al., 2003 Sporer & Schwandt, 2006 Vrij et al., 2017)-and perhaps more commonly-provide honest but erroneous accounts. Indeed, eyewitness testimonies are often critical in crime investigations and ensuing trials (Wells et al., 2006). In courts all over the world, judges and jurors must decide whether eyewitness testimonies are correct, sometimes with the fate of people's lives at stake. Judging the accuracy of another person's memory is not always a trivial matter. However, a complete reliance on effort cues showed substantially better performance than relying on one's own judgments skills at best, and offered equal performance at worst. Moreover, the current study corroborates previous findings that (a) judging testimony accuracy is a difficult task and (b) people spontaneously rely on effort cues to some extent when judging accuracy.
In Experiment 1, we also compared judgment accuracy between police detectives, police students and laypersons, and found no significant difference, in contrast to previous studies. Performance was above chance in both experiments, but there was only a significant effect of the effort-cue instruction in Experiment 2. Participants read eyewitness testimony transcripts and judged statement accuracy. In two experiments, we attempted to improve judgments of testimony accuracy by informing participants about these effort cues. Recent research has shown that incorrect statements in eyewitness testimonies contain more cues to effortful memory retrieval than correct statements.