A pressing concern with the eyewitness testimony used in many criminal cases is that jurors may be swayed by the high confidence of an eyewitness and, as a result, may disregard other factors that provide more diagnostic information. Mock jurors were surveyed using a large national sample of 1,684 laypeople, selected to be representative of the U.S. population (age, race, gender, geographic region), using mock trial videos of eyewitness testimony. To explore the relationship between courtroom confidence and other factors, we used a fractional factorial design, permitting examination of the relationships among seven factors. Among these seven factors, we found that jurors gave most weight to the confidence of eyewitnesses, especially that expressed in the courtroom, irrespective of the eyewitness's testimony about confidence (low or high) at the initial police lineup. Jurors' assessments were not sensitive to the other factors or their interactions in the experiment: crime type (burglary or sexual assault), the race of the defendant and eyewitness, or information provided in judicial instructions or by expert testimony. The disproportionate importance of the eyewitness's expressed confidence has implications for the effectiveness of legal efforts to inform jurors about factors affecting eyewitness memory.

中文翻译：

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在法庭上考虑目击者证据的作用

与许多刑事案件中使用的目击者证词有关的一个紧迫问题是，陪审员可能会因目击者的高度信任而受到影响，结果可能会忽略提供更多诊断信息的其他因素。使用全国范围内1,684名外行人的样本对模拟陪审员进行了调查，这些人被选为代表美国人口（年龄，种族，性别，地理区域）的代表，并使用目击者证词的模拟视频进行了模拟。为了探究法庭信心与其他因素之间的关系，我们使用了分数阶乘设计，可以研究七个因素之间的关系。在这七个因素中，我们发现陪审员最重视目击者的信心，尤其是在法庭上表达的信心，而与目击者的身份无关。关于最初警察阵容的信心（低或高）的证词。陪审员的评估对其他因素或其在实验中的相互作用不敏感：犯罪类型（盗窃或性侵犯），被告的种族和目击者，司法指示或专家证词中提供的信息。目击者表现出的信心过分重要，这对法律上告知陪审员有关影响目击者记忆的因素的努力产生了影响。