Research designed to study psychology in court room

The primary focus of eyewitness testimony

researchers is on reducing the false
conviction rates by improving eyewitness
identification accuracy
 Laboratory based experimental method

• The main focus of the experimenter is to expose the participant eyewitness to few
actors or actor who is performing some action (Wells & Penrod, 2011)

• The participants are shown a simulated crime scene that is either staged or video clip,
video does not require reenactment of actors and there is consistency in presentation
from one participant witness to another.
Globally researchers have accepted video as a presentation way for crime
scene. The instructions generally administered to participant witness prior
to video clip are deceptive in nature to maintain the ecological validity of the
experiment. There is a caution that researchers need to maintain while
building a video clip is not to choose perpetrator actor who is easily
recognizable and avoid cross race bias effects.
•Post viewing of the video clip, participant witness is generally asked to identify the perpetrator
actor. The main aim of the researcher at this stage is to build a non-biased lineup.
•The construction of lineup is often dependent upon the research question to be answered. The
typical method for construction of lineup is to use the same fillers but replace the perpetrator
with an innocent suspect for target absent lineup.
•However, in real life situation, police hardly know who the perpetrator is and their lineup is
based on the verbal description of the eyewitness, therefore it is essential while constructing a
target absent lineup that the innocent suspect closely resembles the perpetrator
 In experimental method there are generally two methods that experiments use to construct lineup

(i) The fillers are selected on the basis of verbal descriptions of the culprit which
is known as match-to-description method
(ii) To select fillers who show some level of similarity to the perpetrator as rated
by participant witnesses during pilot study (Wells & Penrod, 2011). The
participant witnesses are these days subjected to photo arrays instead of live
lineup.
The question that rises is “What makes experimental method the most sought after by
researchers to study eyewitness testimony?”
•Primary strength of experimental method is that they help in establishing
cause-effect relationships.

•In other words, the laboratory based method enables the researchers to
control variables such as lightning conditions for all participants and also helps
to estimate the impact of estimator variables.

•The experimental method also provides for control of variables that enables to
bring clarity to causal relationships that are often obscure in archival research.
Field experiments

•Field experiment just like lab based

experiment generally randomizes the subjects
into treatment and control groups and
compares the outcomes between those groups.
•The experiments are conducted with real
eyewitnesses, usually conducted along with
the police department.
.

The classic example of field experiment is that done by Wright &

Skagerberg (2007). In their study the actual eyewitness to serious crimes
were asked questions regarding their lineup identification either before
or after being told whether the person they had identified was accurate.
The study focused on the feedback effects and therefore it did not matter
whether the identification was accurate or inaccurate.
• In field experiment it is very difficult to assess the
identification accuracy. Till date in USA, DNA exoneration
cases have involved mistaken identification, in other
words, the innocent perpetrator or filler was chosen from
the lineup, Thus, it is difficult to estimate the identification
accuracy in case of eyewitness testimony studies.

•Problems do not arise only in estimating the accuracy in

case of field experiments but it arises for certainty or
confidence scores too. The notion that filler identifications
are inaccurate and perpetrator identifications are
accurate is not always correct.
“However, caution needs to be exercised because lab based
experiments have shown that non-blind lineup administrators
influence the confidence level of witness.”
In the field experiment numerous
variables such as exposure time, lightning
conditions, delay between witnessing and
testing, fillers in lineup, type of lineup
(target present or target absent lineup),
approximately same level of anxiety and
arousal vary from one witness to the next.
Thus, this affects the levels of data analysis
and contributes to the noise in data that
result in need for larger sample sizes.