Convicting with confidence? Why we should not over-rely on eyewitness confidence

Abstract

Eyewitness memory researchers have recently devoted considerable attention to eyewitness confidence. While there is strong consensus that courtroom confidence is problematic, we now recognise that an eyewitness's initial confidence in their first identificationin certain contextscan be of value. A few psychological scientists, however, have confidently, but erroneously claimed that in real-world cases, eyewitness initial confidence is the most important indicator of eyewitness accuracy, trumping all other factors that might exist in a case. This claim accompanies an exaggeration of the role of eyewitnesses' "initial confidence" in the DNA exoneration cases. Still worse, overstated claims about the confidence-accuracy relationship, and eyewitness memory, have reached our top scientific journals, news articles, and criminal cases. To set the record straight, we review what we actually know and do not know about the "initial confidence" of eyewitnesses in the DNA exoneration cases. Further reasons for skepticism about the value of the confidence-accuracy relationship in real-world cases come from new analyses of a separate database, the National Registry of Exonerations. Finally, we review new research that reveals numerous conditions wherein eyewitnesses with high initial confidence end up being wrong.

Evaluating the claim that high confidence implies high accuracy in eyewitness identification.

“…Others have demonstrated that when memory performance is extremely low, the accuracy of high-confidence identifications decreases (Giacona et al, 2021). Others yet have pointed to failures to replicate the finding that high confidence implies high accuracy (Sauer et al, 2019) and have also called into question what we know about the accuracy of high-confidence identifications in real cases (Berkowitz et al, 2020). Our work augments these arguments by clarifying how data examining the confidence-accuracy relationship ought to be analyzed and by providing the field, broadly defined, with explicit criteria that can be used to evaluate the strength of claims pertaining to the confidence-accuracy relationship.…”

“That’s the way my Wednesdays always go”: reverse-order instructions insufficient to mitigate schema-consistent errors in alibi generation

“…Although the confidence-accuracy relationship has been somewhat inconsistent across previous alibi generation studies (Cardenas et al, 2020;Leins and Charman, 2016), confidence ratings in the current study were not related strongly to the accuracy of the alibi. Thus, our findings suggest that legal personnel should be careful not to overstate the informativeness of an alibi provider's confidence, echoing similar concerns from the eyewitness context (Berkowitz et al, 2020). Ultimately, accused persons may not only produce a false alibi owing to schema usage, but may also be fully confident that the alibi is accuratefurther damaging their credibility.…”

Moderators of relative confidence calibration: A meta-analysis of the across-subject relationship between confidence and accuracy

“…Similarly, the confidence expressed in eyewitness testimonies can have a large impact on the outcome of a trial (Tenney et al, 2008). Perhaps due to the enormous stakes of such testimonies, there is a lively debate on how trustworthy confidence ratings of eye witnesses really are (Berkowitz et al, 2020;Juslin et al, 1996;Loftus & Greenspan, 2017;Wixted & Wells, 2017). As these examples demonstrate, understanding how much we can trust the confidence expressed by others has important implications for many domains as disparate as law, medicine, and education.…”