Do the clothes make the criminal? The influence of clothing match on identification accuracy in showups.

Abstract

a b s t r a c tShowups, a single suspect identification, are thought to be a more suggestive procedure than traditional lineups by the U.S. Supreme Court and social science researchers. Previous research typically finds that a clothing match in showup identifications increases false identifications. However, these experiments do not allow for a determination of whether this increase arises from a change in response bias, reduced discriminability, or both. In the present study, participants viewed a mock crime video and made a showup identification with either a clothing match or mismatch. Contrary to prior research, the best discriminability occurred when the guilty and innocent suspects wore clothing that matched the clothing worn during the crime. A clothing match also resulted in a more liberal response bias. The results are consistent with the principle of encoding specificity and the outshining hypothesis, as instantiated in the item, context, ensemble theory. Practical implications are discussed.

Advances in Psychology and Law

“…Moreover, a clothing match should be more likely in a showup because it generally takes place shortly after the crime and in close temporal and spatial proximity (see Valentine et al, 2012 ), making it less likely that a perpetrator could change clothing before the identifi cation. Although some authors have reported that a clothing match increases false identifications and has no effect on correct identifi cations (Dysart Lindsay, & Dupuis, 2006;Yarmey et al, 1996 ), Wetmore, Neuschatz, Gronlund, Key, and Goodsell ( 2015b ) recently found, using ROC analysis, that clothing match enhanced discriminability from showups relative to non-matching clothing. Therefore, it is possible that a clothing match might be benefi cial to a showup identifi cation.…”

“…To test the clothing match predictions, we compared immediate showups in which the clothing was the same during the crime and the identifi cation (the match conditions from Wetmore et al, 2015b ) to lineups that were conducted immediately or after a delay with no clothing match. As can be seen in Panel b of Fig.…”

“…It is important to note that there were other differences between the clothing match showups (Wetmore et al, 2015b ) including the use of video showups that showed the suspect's entire body, compared to lineup conditions that utilized photo headshots. However, because the showup revealed the suspect's entire body, it likely provided additional cues to help participants discriminate the guilty from the innocent suspect.…”

“…The scale was converted to proportions by dividing each scale value by 7, so that the fi rst entry is 1/7 (.14), the second is 2/7 (.29), and so on. We used the same scale for all the showup studies except Wetmore et al ( 2015b ), which had confi dence ranging from 1 (least confi dent) to 10 (most confi dent). For this study, we combined confi dence categories 2 and 3, 5 and 6, and 8 and 9 to put confi dence on a 7-point scale.…”

“…But more to the point, note that the proportion correct from showups varies little from a confidence level of 2 (.64) to a confi dence level of 7 (.75). In contrast, the proportion 7 We reanalyzed the data excluding the Wetmore et al ( 2015b ) study, which was the only study using a 10-point scale. Doing this did not change the pattern of results.…”