The cognitive psychology of eyewitness testimony PDF Print E-mail

Emanating from the fields of cognitive psychology, developmental psychology and social psychology, the research on eyewitnesses in everyday and forensic contexts covers a wide range of basic and applied research questions, employs a wide range of research designs, and combines qualitative analyses with hard-core experimental data. The research of the psychology and law group mirrors this broad-scale approach, combining studies of factors affecting the performance of eyewitnesses with studies of decision processes involved in the judgments of reliability and credibility of witnesses. We are currently pursuing three lines of research.

1) What do people believe about memory?
2) Factors affecting the perceived credibility of eyewitnesses
3) Social biases in face recognition

 

1) What do people believe about memory?

Eyewitness errors are involved in a very high proportion of wrongful convictions. There are several factors contributing to the impact of such errors, one obvious factor is insufficient knowledge about the fallibility of human perception and memory among both witnesses and the chief players in the judicial system. Decisions based on erroneous psychological folklore pose a threat to criminal justice. To evaluate this question we are carrying out a series of large-scale surveys, probing the knowledge and beliefs about memory in general and about eyewitness testimony in particular, among Norwegian judges, jurors and potential jurors, and psychologists and psychiatrists, and compare the lay beliefs with well-established memory science.  

2) Factors affecting the perceived credibility of eyewitnesses

Extensive research has documented that judgments of witness credibility are unreliable, and that it is almost impossible to discriminate between lying and truth-telling witnesses based on witness behavior. Credibility judgments are never the less part of the social judgments in everyday life and in court. Research on implicit social cognition shows that social stereotypes influence social judgments despite explicit denial of such stereotypes. This project focuses on factors that bias judgments of witness credibility, such as the emotional expression of the witness, using video recording of witness statements with realistic crime scenarios. 

3) Social biases in face recognition

Own-race bias refers to the fact that people are better at remembering faces belonging to their own ethnic group compared to faces belonging to other ethnic groups. Own-race bias is very weak in pre-schoolers and develops during the school years to reach a final level in young adults (Goodman et al., 2007). This cognitive bias is little affected by the amount of cross-racial exposure, and may reflect a selective attention to own-race members, a kind of cognitive schema that filters social information and leads to differentiated cognitive representations of own-race members and prototype representations of other-race members. We investigate own-race bias in conventional experimentqal designs, and by analysing eye movement patterns and pupillary reactions to images of faces. We plan to extend the experiments to categories such as cross-age and cross-gender face memory and social categories.

Participants at the department of psychology: Svein Magnussen, Bruno Laeng,  Annika Melinder, Ellen Wessel, EKUP, Dag Erik Eilertsen.

International collaborations: University of Padua, Italy, University of California, Davis, USA, Catholic University of America, USA, University of North Dakota, USA.