In his book On the Witness Stand: Essays on Psychology and Crime, Hugo Münsterberg (1908) warned about the unreliability of eyewitness memory. As it turns out, he was prescient. Since 1989, 349 wrongful convictions have been overturned through DNA testing, and eyewitness misidentification played a role in over 70% of those cases—far more than any other contributing cause (Innocence Project, 2016). No one doubts that the large majority of these misidentifications were made in good faith. Somehow, these eyewitnesses came to honestly but mistakenly believe that the innocent defendant was the person who committed the crime. How did that happen? The short explanation is that the procedures used for testing eyewitness identification were not developed and validated in the scientific laboratory before being implemented in the field. Instead, they were developed within the criminal justice system and implemented under the mistaken assumption that they accurately identified the guilty without unduly jeopardizing the innocent.

中文翻译：

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目击者信心与识别准确性之间的关系：一个新的综合

在他的《在证人席上：心理学与犯罪论》，雨果·明斯特伯格（HugoMünsterberg，1908年）警告说，目击者记忆的不可靠性。事实证明，他是有先见之明的。自1989年以来，通过DNA测试推翻了349起错误定罪，目击者的错误识别在其中超过70％的案件中发挥了作用-远远超过其他任何起因（Innocence Project，2016）。毫无疑问，这些错误标识中的绝大多数是出于善意。这些目击者不知何故诚实地但错误地认为无辜的被告是犯罪的人。那是怎么发生的？简短的解释是，用于测试目击者识别的程序尚未在现场进行之前在科学实验室中开发和验证。反而，