Handbook Of Eyewitness Psychology 2 Volume Set

Michael P. Toglia,J. Don Read,David F. Ross,R.C.L. Lindsay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317777823
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie en psychologie

The Handbook of Eyewitness Psychology presents a survey of research and legal opinions from international experts on the rapidly expanding scientific literature addressing the accuracy and limitations of eyewitnesses as a source of evidence for the courts. For the first time, extensive reviews of factors influencing witnesses of all ages – children, adults, and the elderly – are compiled in a single pair of volumes. The disparate research currently being conducted in eyewitness memory in psychology, criminal justice, and legal studies is coherently presented in this work.

Volume 1 covers memory for events. Volume 2 cover memory for people.

I
Finding Suspects

1
Person Descriptions as Eyewitness Evidence

Christian A. Meissner
University of Texas at El Paso
Siegfried L. Sporer
University of Giessen, Germany
Jonathan W. Schooler
University of British Columbia, Canada

Two teenage girls were enjoying their family vacation in a hotel hot tub one evening. Shortly after their parents had left them, the girls were approached by a stranger, who proceeded to join them in the hot tub. Following several minutes of conversation, the stranger attempted to molest the older girl by touching her “private parts.” The older girl struck the stranger in the face and told him to stop, and instructed the younger girl to find their parents. After the older girl shouted “rape” several times, the stranger finally exited the hot tub, gathered his belongings, and ran from the area. The girls would later describe the stranger as a male in his twenties, with no shirt, wearing tan/brown shorts and a shell necklace. He had dark hair, and a dark/suntanned complexion. Upon receiving the description, detectives released a BOLO (“be on the lookout”), and a suspect matching the description was detained 45 minutes later as he walked on the beach about a half-mile from the hotel. The girls were brought to the suspect and together identified him as the stranger they had encountered. The suspect was arrested for the crime, but prosecutors would later drop the charges when the suspect provided a detailed (and corroborated) alibi for his whereabouts at the time of the incident. Simply put, detectives had detained the wrong person.

Person descriptions represent an important element for detectives in the investigation of any crime. Unfortunately, the descriptions provided by witnesses or victims tend to be rather nondistinct and, like the description provided by the teenage girls above, can frequently apply to many people in the vicinity of the crime. Although descriptions are most often useful for locating a suspect in the immediate aftermath of an incident, they are also used throughout a criminal investigation to identify potential suspects from mug books, to construct sketches or composites of a suspect, and as a basis for selecting fillers when investigators are constructing a lineup identification parade and subsequently assess the “fairness” of that lineup. In addition, witness descriptions are regularly introduced at trial as a means for demonstrating the congruence between the suspect and a witness’s memory. In Neil v. Biggers (1972), the U.S. Supreme Court indicated that witness descriptions could be used as one basis for determining the accuracy of a witness. However, as discussed in this chapter, the relationship between a witness’s description and his or her ability to perceptually identify the actual perpetrator is not clear-cut.

Given the importance of person descriptions as eyewitness evidence, psychologists and criminologists have conducted a wealth of research aimed at establishing what is known about the content and veracity of person descriptions, as well as factors that may positively or negatively influence a witness’s ability to provide an accurate description. The current chapter provides a review of this research, including a discussion of psychological factors that may influence person descriptions at encoding (e.g., alcohol, stress, illumination, distance, etc.), the effects of delay and repeated descriptions over time, the role of person variables (e.g., age, gender, race, etc.) and individual differences, and the influence of misinformation from investigators and/or co-witnesses. In addition, we address the variety of recall techniques that have been explored to improve the quality and quantity of person descriptors, and the relationship between such description procedures and witnesses’ subsequent attempts at perceptual identification of a suspect (i.e., the verbal overshadowing effect, Schooler & Engstler-Schooler, 1990; or the use of person descriptions as retrieval cues, Cutler, Penrod, & Martens, 1987; Sporer, in press).

Contents of Person Descriptions in Real Cases

Quantity and Quality of Descriptors

A number of archival studies have examined the content of person descriptions in real cases. Likely the most well-known study was conducted by Kuehn (1974). This study involved the analysis of person descriptions contained in 100 police protocols of cases of bodily injury, rape, and robbery in Seattle, Washington. Statements were taken from the witnesses immediately after the incident, and all perpetrators in the sample were strangers. Unfortunately, it is not clear from Kuehn’s report whether the descriptions were rendered as free descriptions or were the result of some standardized questioning scheme employed by the local police. The number of details contained in the descriptions was fairly meager overall (with a maximum of nine descriptors)—on average there were 7.2 descriptors, whereas most witnesses reported 8 or 9 features. Only four victims were unable to provide any details at all. In descending order of frequency, gender, age, height, build, race, weight, complexion, and hair color were mentioned. With the exception of eye color (23%), all features were named by more than 70% of all victims. Kuehn concluded from these data that witnesses were able to convey a general impression about the perpetrator but could not provide more specific features, like hair or eye color.

In contrast to Kuehn (1974), Yuille and Cutshall (1986) examined a single shooting incident, involving a total of 21 witnesses, of which 13 collaborated in a follow-up research interview. Surprisingly, the witnesses’ reports were remarkably elaborate and highly accurate, even after the 5-month delay between the incident and the research interviews. Based on these results, the authors questioned typical laboratory findings that have capitalized on witness errors since the heyday of eyewitness testimony research by Stern (1902) and Munsterburg (1908). However, one potential explanation for the findings of Yuille and Cutshall may be that the type of case, which apparently was quite spectacular, was likely to have involved multiple interviews of the witnesses, many conversations between witnesses and family/friends, as well as ample opportunity to read about the events in the local press. We speculate that these multiple information exposures may have served as opportunities for witnesses to rehearse these events and thus improve recall (for more on the role of verbal and visual rehearsal in eyewitness recall, see Read, Hammersley, Cross-Calvert, & McFadzen, 1989; Sporer, 1988, 1989).

Overall, Yuille and Cutshall (1986) found that the police interview had rendered a total of 392 action, 180 person description, and 78 object description details, many of which turned out to be correct (82%, 76%, and 89%, respectively). These figures were even higher for the research interview, which asked additional questions that were of primary interest to a memory researcher but not to a police investigator. Yet, despite the large number of correct details elicited by both the police and the researchers in the interviews there were also some errors in the person descriptions, most of which referred to estimates of height, weight, and age (23% errors out of a total of 46 such statistics in the police interview). Such estimates were deemed errors if they were outside of an acceptable range determined by the authors (i.e., plus or minus 2 inches or years, or 5 pounds). Second in errors were faulty descriptions of style and color of hair, as well as style and color of clothing (18%). Problems with descriptions of clothing, particularly memory for colors, were noted long ago by Munsterberg (1908). Cutshall and Yuille (1989) were subsequently able to elicit a greater number of details (although not a greater proportion of accurate details) than the police from witnesses of shootings and of bank robberies up to 2 years after the incident.

Sporer (1992a) analyzed criminal records containing 100 witnesses (46 male, 54 female) who provided a total of 139 person descriptions of perpetrators of capital crimes (mostly cases of robbery and rape). About half of the descriptions were from witnesses who were themselves victims or bystanders involved in the criminal action; the other half were from persons who had observed the criminal outside the context of the crime itself. Overall, person descriptions tended to be rather poor; the number of descriptive details mentioned ranged from 1 to 48 details (M = 9.71; SD = 7.03). Almost one-fourth of all descriptive details referred to general information such as height, age, and race, where height estimates frequently referenced some (unknown) population norm (e.g., “average height”, “normal body figure,” etc.). Another 31% of descriptors referred to clothes, and 30% described the face of the perpetrator. Some witnesses also mentioned jewelry or the dialect spoken. Close to 5% of the descriptors referenced personality characteristics (which are useless when investigators are trying to find a person to arrest, but may promote subsequent recognition of the person because of the deeper level of processing possibly involved at encoding; see Sporer, 1991). It is also noteworthy that quantity and pattern of descriptions found in this archival study closely resembled those of a staged event study in which a confederate had interrupted a lecture to take away a slide projector (Sporer, 1992b).

Of the facial descriptors analyzed by Sporer (1992a), the majority referred to the upper half of the face, particularly the hair of the perpetrator. This finding confirms earlier studies on contents of facial descriptions (Ellis, Shepherd, & Davies, 1980; Laughery, Duval, & Wogalter, 1986; Shepherd, Ellis, & Davies, 1977) and on the importance of upper portions of the face in the recognition process (e.g., Fisher & Cox, 1975). In fact, the cheek and chin (but also the forehead) were rarely mentioned in these descriptions. Although reference to hair (about 16% of all descriptors) appeared to be the most dominant single descriptor, it is also the most problematic and is likely to be of little help in the pursuit of a criminal because hair style can be most readily altered in comparison with other more permanent features (e.g., inner features of a face). Similarly, the large number of references to the clothing of the perpetrator is generally of limited value when police are attempting to locate a perpetrator.

Lindsay, Martin, and Webber (1994) examined the descriptions of 105 criminals published in the Kingston, Ontario newspaper (The Whig Standard) and compared their completeness with that of 100 descriptions (across five targets) obtained from a series of laboratory studies. Participant-witnesses viewing staged crimes were most likely to report clothing (99%), hair color (90%), and height (86%), whereas less than 50% reported such obvious descriptors as gender, age, or race/ethnicity. The most frequently reported feature of the face was the eyes (43%), and all other features were reported less than 25% of the time. Witnesses to real crimes were significantly more likely to report gender (96%), hair color (38%), clothing (60%), and race/ethnicity (25%), and facial features were provided in less than 10% of the sample. Although the results of Lindsay et al. indicated that laboratory witnesses provided more complete descriptions than real witnesses (7.35 vs. 3.94 features, respectively), they more generally concluded: “The data strongly support our concern that eyewitness descriptions are frequently vague” (p. 531).

Van Koppen and Lochun (1997) reported a large-scale archival analysis of person descriptions in 431 robbery cases. A total of 1313 witnesses provided 2299 descriptions of the offenders. Descriptors were subdivided into 24 permanent descriptors (e.g., gender, skin color) and 19 temporary characteristics (e.g., particulars of clothing, type of mask). Similar to Sporer’s (1992a) findings, the completeness of the descriptions was rather poor. Of the possible maximum of 43 descriptors, the median number provided by each witness was 8 (interquartile range = 6). Permanent features were mentioned more frequently (median = 5, interquartile range = 5) than temporary characteristics (median = 2, interquartile range = 3). Considering that gender, appearance (including race), and skin color were among the most frequently mentioned permanent characteristics (characteristics that are likely the most obvious to any observer), the paucity of these descriptions becomes even more dramatic. Less than 5% of the descriptors referred to inner features of a face (eye color, nose, face color or complexion, mouth, eye shape, teeth, earrings, chin, ear size, ears protruding), which are considered most important for identifying another person (Ellis, 1992). Of the temporary characteristics, the majority of descriptors referred to hats (51%) and hat color (31%), as well as jackets (28%), coats (25%), and trousers (26%), and their respective colors (28%, 22%, and 18%).

Van Koppen and Lochun’s (1997) analysis was not restricted to the quantity of information recalled as in Sporer’s (1992a) study, but also sought to analyze the accuracy of descriptions by validating the descriptions by witnesses against the descriptions contained in the police database used in the Netherlands. Although more elements of the descrptors were correct than incorrect, the majority of crucial facial descriptors were wrong (e.g., accuracy of facial descriptors included: eye color = 36%; nose = 35%; mouth = 39%; chin = 38%). Most strikingly, almost all descriptors of facial hair (beard and mustache) failed to match the police database. Given that perpetrators may have changed these aspects of their appearance over time, however, the latter finding is difficult to interpret. Interestingly, there was a negative correlation between accuracy and completeness, indicating that when witnesses did provide more extensive descriptions their accuracy suffered.

Estimates of Height and Weight

Almost all person descriptions contain references to the perceived height, weight, and age of the perpetrator (Kuehn, 1974; Sporer, 1992a; van Koppen & Lochun, 1997; Yuille & Cutshall, 1986); however, authors differ in their interpretation of existing data regarding the extent to which such estimates are accurate. Some authors have defined accuracy as estimates falling within a certain range of “true” values (e.g., true value plus or minus 2 inches or 5 pounds; see Yarmey & Yarmey, 1997; Yuille & Cutshall, 1986), concluding that estimates appear to be rather accurate. Then again, treating values with a difference of 4 inches (almost 10 cm) in height as “accurate” would allow an estimate of 170 cm to be equivalent to one of 180 cm, values that are substantially below or above the population average (see Flin & Shepherd, 1986; Sporer, 1996).

When the accuracy of estimates for height and weight are defined as the correlation between the actual values and their estimates, these correlations are well below their maximum possible value. For example, ...