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.

We examined how giving eyewitnesses a weak recognition experience impacts their identification decisions. In two 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 culpritremoved 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.

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” [1]. 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.

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 ' 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

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.