Susceptibility to postidentification feedback is affected by source credibility

Abstract

How much a person is affected by postidentification feedback is dependent on the credibility of the person giving the feedback. Seven hundred and ninety participants across three experiments viewed a crime video, made judgments from a line-up, were provided with co-witness and/or outcome feedback (from police officers [high credibility] or children [low credibility]), and answered testimony-relevant questions (e.g. How good a view did you get of the person in the video?). The aim was to find out how high versus low credibility co-witness feedback affects a witness' retrospective judgments (Experiment 1) as well as estimations of these co-witnesses' judgments (Experiment 2). Experiment 1 showed that the feedback effect was only observed when the co-witness responses were attributed to a high credibility source. Experiment 2 showed that high credibility co-witnesses were estimated to score higher on the testimony-relevant questions as compared to low credibility co-witnesses. Experiment 3 showed that outcome feedback (e.g. 'you identified the suspect') produces stronger effects on testimony-relevant questions than co-witness feedback. The implications of these findings are that when postidentification feedback is present, it is important to determine the source of this feedback.Many eyewitness identifications are inaccurate. Lay people often judge the reliability of an identification by the witness' self-reported ease of identification, confidence and encoding circumstances. These self-reports can be contaminated by social influences occurring after the identification such as the feedback witnesses receive about whether they chose the suspect, or not, and about whether other co-witnesses chose the same person, or not. Numerous studies have shown that this postidentification feedback has a large effect on retrospective testimony-relevant judgments such as willingness to testify in court, how good a view a person had of the culprit during the crime and confidence/certainty in the identification (e.g.

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