Gender Effects Regarding Eyewitness Identification Performance

Sex differences in eyewitness memory: A scoping review

“… - Male perpetrator / female victim - Male perpetrator / male victim - Female perpetrator / female victim - Female perpetrator / male victim - Own-gender bias demonstrated with males more accurate for details of male perpetrator and females more accurate for details of female perpetrator -Poor accuracy for personal descriptions overall - No sex differences in number of personal descriptors recalled for either the male or female perpetrators. Fazlic et al 2020 Bosnia and Herzeg-ovina - N = 98 - 55 males / 43 females - Undergraduate university students - Mean age = 18.9 years - 44-s video of simulated bank robbery - 5-min distractor task either describing perpetrator or listing European capital cities - 20-min crossword puzzle distractor task - Identification task to identify perpetrator from 8-item photo line-up - Male perpetrator - Males and females performed similarly for identification accuracy - Males and females made mistaken identifications at similar rates - No own-gender bias found for males (relevant to males only as the perpetrator was male) - Gender of eyewitness may not be a useful predictor of accuracy by itself, but may interact with other combined factors such as age, race, culture – particularly regarding social stereotypes about gender differences Longstaff and Belz 2020 Australia - N = 115 - 77 females, mean age = 39.7 years 38 males, mean age = 40.5 years - University students - Narrative text that primed the scenario - POV video (1 min, 43 s) of a person walking through a hallway and unexpectedly meeting a stranger (section 1), who is revealed as female or male (section 2) - Multiple-choice questions for recall of environmental, object, and person details - Likert scales to rate feeling about the scenario (i.e., anxiety and threat) - One male or - One female - Females had higher accuracy for stranger-related questions - Females were more accurate at identifying sex of stranger - Females had higher levels of anxiety and viewed stranger as more threatening - Males were slightly more accurate for surroundings-related questions - Males and females performed similarly for total accuracy and general questions - Both males and females demonstrated a bias towards identifying the stranger as male - Suggest sex differences in accuracy and sex identification may occur because females focus attention on the stranger relatively longer out of caution and because processing person information is an evolved adaptation for females - Overall bias to identify stranger as male could provide a functional evolutionary benefit (e.g., safety) ...…”

“…Nonetheless, it was suggested that the higher accuracy demonstrated by females may reflect a more general superiority in episodic memory recall (Lindholm & Christianson, 1998 ). The remaining studies that measured overall accuracy for recall (Butts et al, 1995 ; Clifford & Scott, 1978 ; Loftus et al, 1992 ; Longstaff & Belz, 2020 ), face identification (Fazlic et al, 2020 ), and both recall and face identification (Sharps et al, 2007 ; Yarmey & Jones, 1983 ) all found that there were no differences between males and females. It should be noted, however, that Sharps et al ( 2007 ) state that in their study this was due to the fact that there were too few participants in total who made accurate identifications.…”