Eyewitness Case Study

with the hood down. The sweatshirt was made more recognizable by having 2 patches placed on it. One patch was white and red and the other patch was white and blue;
In part 1 of the study, participants were randomly assigned a condition and viewed a video, after which they were asked to give a description of the thief and his clothing. A five minute delay was then put in place, After this participants read instructions and viewed the show up. Two or three days after part 1, participants completed an online survey where they were asked to report their show up decision. They were then given instructions and presented with the lineup and asked to again identify the suspect. Lineup photographs were presented simultaneously and the position of the …show more content…
As shown by the results people were much less likely to make a correct identification when the suspect was outside of their racial group and more likely to make an identification based on clothing rather than facial features. Stephens made his initial identification of Bulter from 50 feet away, probably because he saw a black person with similar clothing and he thought it looked like the suspect. Additionally, he was more likely to chose someone, anyone, at the line up then to not choose anyone at all and more likely to confirm his identifiction than to reject it later.
A third article that I believe shows some fault in the eyewitness identification is "Effects of distance on face recognition: Implications for eyewitness identification" (Lampinen, 2014). The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between identification accuracy and distance. 195 college students participated in this study. 61 % were female and 39% were male. The average age of participants was 19.7 years old. The most of participants were Caucasian (86.67 %), while the rest wereAfrican-American (4 .1 %), Asian (5.1 %), Hispanic (2.0 %), Native American (1.0 %), and other races/ethnicities (1.0