Evaluating Eyewitness Evidence

Like many issues in the psychology–law area, when it comes to eyewitness evidence, researchers see an obvious opportunity to help solve a problem—in this case, to maximize the rate of accurate information and identification decisions while at the same time minimizing the rate of mistakes. Psychology is especially well suited to this task, given its interest in the psychological aspects of eyewitness evidence, such as attention (e.g., studying an assailant’s face while being assaulted vs. learning only later that a bank customer committed fraud by passing a bad check), perception (e.g., of color, distance, height, speed), memory (e.g., length of retention interval, interference, source monitoring), decision making (e.g., determining the odds of a witness choosing a suspect by chance), interpersonal communication (e.g., witness interviews), and attribution theory (e.g., a witness wonders why she has been asked a particular question or shown a particular lineup). So, to address the legal system’s “problem,”...