ABSTRACT

Jurors distrust eyewitness testimony when eyewitness confidence is inflated between the incident and identification in court. Nevertheless, jurors may view inflated-confidence testimony as reliable if the eyewitness gives a justification for the inflation. Researchers have not examined how this ‘recovery of eyewitness credibility’ is affected by specific features of the justification (i.e. degree of detail). In Experiment 1, we manipulated the degree of detail in post-confidence-inflation eyewitness justifications containing information related to a witnessed criminal. We examined the effects of such justifications on participants’ ratings of the eyewitness testimony. Although highly detailed but inconsistent eyewitnesses who gave a related justification were not able to fully recover their credibility, we found that they showed reduced credibility loss relative to eyewitnesses who gave a less detailed justification or no justification. In a second experiment, we investigated the possibility that an eyewitness with inflated confidence could recover their credibility with a justification containing information unrelated to the criminal. Interestingly, we found that even when the justification was unrelated to the criminal, highly detailed but inconsistent eyewitnesses could mitigate some of their credibility loss. Implications for the mechanisms underlying eyewitness credibility recovery, and their ramifications for real-world cases are discussed.

摘要

当目击者的信心在事件和法庭上的鉴定之间被夸大时，陪审员不信任目击者的证词。尽管如此，如果目击者给出了夸大的理由，陪审员可能会认为夸大的信心证词是可靠的。研究人员尚未研究这种“目击者可信度的恢复”是如何受到证明的特定特征（即详细程度）的影响。在实验 1 中，我们操纵了信心膨胀后目击证人证词的详细程度，其中包含相关信息给目击证人的罪犯。我们研究了这些理由对参与者对目击者证词评分的影响。尽管提供相关理由的非常详细但不一致的目击者无法完全恢复其可信度，但我们发现，与提供不那么详细的理由或没有理由的目击者相比，他们表现出的可信度损失减少。在第二个实验中，我们调查了信心膨胀的目击者可以通过包含不相关信息的理由恢复其可信度的可能性给罪犯。有趣的是，我们发现即使正当理由与犯罪者无关时，非常详细但不一致的目击者也可以减轻他们的一些可信度损失。讨论了目击者可信度恢复机制的影响，以及它们对现实世界案例的影响。