8.8: Eyewitness Testimony

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Many crimes would never be solved without eyewitness testimony. But how good is it? Study after study shows that people in general, and particularly jurors, put great confidence in the testimony of eyewitnesses. It has also been found that the more confident a witness sounds, the more persuasive they are.

But it has also been found that witnesses who seem the most confident are by no means always the most accurate. Indeed, eyewitnesses, whether confident or not, are often mistaken. Even when they make every attempt to be honest and conscientious, as most do, their memories are subject to all the infirmities discussed earlier in this chapter. Indeed, many studies show that the descriptions of eyewitnesses are often dramatically wrong, and many innocent people have been convicted on the basis of well-meaning, but inaccurate, eye-witness testimony.

By now the fallibility of eyewitnesses shouldn’t seem that surprising. After all, they often get only a quick glimpse of the perpetrator. In the case of violent crimes, they are likely to feel stress and fear, which degrade the ability to remember details. There are further problems with police line-ups. Most witnesses believe that the guilty person is in the line-up, so they often select the person who looks most like the person they saw. Furthermore, police prompting or leading questions can lead to misinformation effects.

You have now learned enough about memory that you should be able to think of various things that would enhance the reliability of eyewitnesses and, indeed, of anyone else who is trying to remember some event. What might you do? Could you employ retrieval cues? What things should the questioner avoid doing? We will return to these questions below, but you should try to answer them now.