Improving Juror Sensitivity to Eyewitness Confidence Inflation Using a Visual Aid

Contrary to the widespread belief that eyewitnesses are always fallible and that an eyewitness’ confidence is not indicative of identification accuracy, a new body of literature tells a different story: A highly confident eyewitness, measured properly (first fair test of memory, immediate confidence recorded), is likely to be correct; and conversely, an eyewitness that reports low confidence in the same situation is likely making an error. Although there is evidence that jurors intuitively understand this strong confidence-accuracy relationship, prior research shows that they do not understand the measurement nuances, and that interventions are needed. This dissertation reviews some traditional approaches to improving how jurors think about eyewitness evidence, like pattern jury instructions and expert testimony, concluding that these approaches are too complex and, if anything, simply make jurors skeptical. The present studies designed and tested a novel intervention, presenting a simplified message focused on initial eyewitness confidence from fair memory test circumstances, using a visual aid with supporting text instruction. Overall, the results showed some support for this intervention as an approach to sensitizing jurors to eyewitness evidence. Specifically, the intervention sensitized jurors to eyewitness confidence inflation, compared to modified Henderson instructions and a control condition with no instruction. These results suggest that the visual aid intervention could be a viable alternative to traditional approaches, pending further research to validate this novel aid