Confident Identification Pdf For Free

The confidence that eyewitnesses express in their decision at an identification test or lineup has long been recognized within the criminal justice system as an indicator of the likely reliability or accuracy of the witness.

Confidence is deemed positively related to accuracy if it is greater among accurate than inaccurate identifications.

High confidence indicated high accuracy; a 4 on a 4-point scale produces roughly the same level of accuracy as 100 on a 100-point scale. The question that matters for judges and jurors is whether accuracy of the eyewitness would change if confidence judgments were made more or less fine-grained scales.

The results will show that when pristine identification procedures are used, eyewitness confidence is a highly informative indicator of accuracy, and high-confidence suspect identifications are highly accurate.

Although it has been a matter of some debate over the years, the now prevailing view is that there is a consistent positive, albeit not perfect, relationship between confidence and recognition accuracy (Wixted et al., 2015; Wixted and Wells, 2017; see also Sporer et al., 1995; Juslin et al., 1996; Lindsay et al., 1998) ...

The U.S. Innocence Project estimates that eyewitness error was a contributing cause in 70 percent of the 356 wrongfully convicted accused who have been exonerated by DNA evidence in that country. The American Psychological Association estimates that one in three eyewitnesses make an erroneous identification.

While confidence in our own memories is not a perfect predictor of accuracy, research shows a consistent positive relationship between confidence judgments and memory accuracy (e.g., Robinson and Johnson, 1996; Odinot and Wolters, 2006; Wixted and Wells, 2017).