What follows is a selection of short review papers from the journal Current Directions in Psychological 

Science.  The first two articles are older articles that appeared in that journal a decade or two ago.  The 

second two, are articles from the same labs (The Wells and Loftus labs) that appeared in the February 

2011 Special Issue on Psychology and the Law of that journal.  If you are interested in psychology and 

the law, this special issue may be of interest to you (http://cdp.sagepub.com/content/20/1).   

 

The papers that follow are: 

Loftus, E. F. (1992). When a lie becomes memory's truth: Memory distortion after exposure to 

misinformation. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 1(4), 121‐121‐123. doi:10.1111/1467‐

8721.ep10769035 

 

Wells, G. L., Olson, E. A., & Charman, S. D. (2002). The confidence of eyewitnesses in their identifications 

from lineups. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 11(5), 151‐151‐154. doi:10.1111/1467‐

8721.00189 

 

Brewer, N., & Wells, G. L. (2011). Eyewitness identification. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 

20(1), 24‐24‐27. doi:10.1177/0963721410389169 

 

Frenda, S. J., Nichols, R. M., & Loftus, E. F. (2011). Current issues and advances in misinformation 

research. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 20(1), 20‐20‐23. doi:10.1177/0963721410396620 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CURRENT DIRECTIONS IN PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE 121

When A Lie Becomes Memory's Truth:

Memory Distortion After Exposure to Misinformation1

Elizabeth F. Loftus

What happens when people wit

ness an event, say, a crime or acci

dent, and are later exposed to new

information about that event? Two

decades of research have been de

voted to the influence of new infor

mation on the recollections of such

witnesses. An all-too-common find

ing is that after receipt of new infor

mation that is misleading in some

way, people make errors when they

report what they saw. New,

postevent information often be

comes incorporated into a recollec

tion, supplementing or altering it, sometimes in dramatic ways. New

information invades us, like a Trojan

horse, precisely because we do not

detect its influence. Understanding how we become tricked by revised

data about a witnessed event is a

central goal of this research.

Current research showing how

memory can become skewed when

people assimilate new data utilizes a

simple paradigm. Participants first

witness a complex event, such as a

simulated violent crime or automo

bile accident. Subsequently, half the

participants receive new, mislead

ing information about the event. The

other half do not get any misinfor

Elizabeth F. Loftus is Professor of

Psychology at the University of

Washington. Her most recent book is Witness for the Defense: The Ac

cused, the Eyewitness, and the Ex

pert Who Puts Memory on Trial, coauthored with K. Ketcham (St.

Martin's Press, 1991). Address

correspondence to E. Loftus, De

partment of Psychology, Univer

sity of Washington, Seattle, WA

98195; e-mail: eloftus(a milton.

u.washington.edu.

mation. Finally, all participants at

tempt to recall the original event. In

a typical example of a study using this paradigm, participants saw a

simulated traffic accident. They then

received written information about

the accident, but some people were

misled about what they saw. A stop

sign, for instance, was referred to as

a yield sign. When asked whether

they originally saw a stop or a yield

sign, participants given the phony information tended to adopt it as

their memory; they said they saw a

yield sign.2 In these and many other

experiments, people who had not

received the phony information had

much more accurate memories. In

some experiments, the deficits in

memory performance following re

ceipt of misinformation have been

dramatic, with performance differ ences as large as 30% or 40%.

This degree of distorted reporting has been found in scores of studies,

involving a wide variety of materi

als. People have recalled seeing nonexistent items, such as broken

glass, tape recorders, and even

something as large and conspicuous as a barn (in a bucolic scene that

contained no buildings at all), and have recalled incorrect traits for items they did see, such that a clean shaven man developed a mustache,

straight hair became curly, a stop

sign became a yield sign, and a

hammer became a screwdriver. In

short, misleading postevent informa

tion can alter a person's recollection in a powerful, even predictable,

manner.

The change in report arising after

receipt of misinformation is often re

ferred to as the misinformation ef

fect.3 Four questions about the mis

Information effect have occupied the

attention of researchers:

1. When are people particularly

susceptible to the damaging in

fluence on recollection of mis

leading information, and when

are people particularly resistant?

2. What groups of people are par

ticularly prone to having their

recollections be modified, and

what groups are resistant?

3. Does misinformation actually im

pair a person's ability to remem

ber details of an event? Put an

other way, what happens to the

original memory after exposure to misinformation?

4. Do people genuinely believe in

the misinformation?

WHEN ARE PEOPLE SUSCEPTIBLE TO

MISINFORMATION?

A growing body of studies reveals

the conditions that make people par

ticularly susceptible to the influence

of misinformation. For example,

people are particularly prone to hav

ing their memories modified when

the passage of time allows the orig inal memory to fade. Put another

way, with a long interval between

the event and the misinformation, the injection of misinformation be comes relatively easy. In its weak

ened condition, memory?like the disease-ridden body?becomes es

pecially vulnerable to repeated as

saults on its very essence. This find

ing leads us to a principle, the

discrepancy detection principle, for

determining when changes in recol

lection will occur:

Recollections are more likely to

change if a person does not immediately detect discrepancies between postevent information and memory for the original

event.

Other lines of research fit well

with the discrepancy detection prin

ciple. For example, if people are ex

posed to misinformation that is sub

Copyright ? 1992 American Psychological Society

122 VOLUME 1, NUMBER 4, AUGUST 1992

tie, they are more likely to be

influenced than if the misinforma tion is not subtle. Consider the sim

ple interrogative sentence "Was the

mustache worn by the tall intruder

light or dark brown?" This sentence

not so subtly suggests the existence

of a mustache. By comparison, "Did

the intruder who was tall and had a

mustache say anything to the profes sor?" is more subtle in its suggestion

of the mustache, having embedded

this idea in a relative clause. People are more likely to falsely claim that

they saw a mustache when exposed to the more subtle version.

Another line of research that fits

well with the discrepancy detection

principle involves explicit warnings. If people are warned prior to a

postevent narrative that the narrative

may be misleading, they are better

able to resist its influence than if they are not warned. In these various

lines of research, the subject's detec

tion of discrepancies between the

original memory and the postevent

passage (or failure to detect discrep ancies) appears to be crucial. With a

long interval between event and

misinformation, and with misinfor

mation that is subtly embedded, the

ability of subjects to detect a dis

crepancy is minimized. In contrast, when subjects are warned about the

likelihood of incorrect information,

they scrutinize the postevent infor

mation, and the likelihood of detec

tion of a discrepancy is enhanced. It is

also true that people are particularly

susceptible if they can be induced to

repeat the misinformation as fact.

WHO IS SUSCEPTIBLE TO MISINFORMATION?

The majority of the studies of the

misinformation effect have been

conducted with college students, and few individual difference vari

ables have emerged. Where group differences do emerge is in misinfor

mation studies using children as sub

jects. It is common (although not

universal) to find that young children are especially susceptible to these

manipulations.4 The largest study of individual dif

ferences was recently conducted with nearly 2,000 people who were

attending a science museum in San

Francisco.5 The experiment was one

of the interactive exhibits at the mu

seum, which means that subjects

provided data for the experiment while learning from the exhibit. All subjects watched a short film clip and later answered a series of ques tions about it. Some subjects were

exposed to misleading questions but

others were not, so that the impact of misinformation could be as

sessed. The most important demo

graphic variable was the age of the

subject, which varied between 5

and 75. Memory performance rose

as a function of age up to the 20s, leveled off, and then fell sharply for

subjects over age 65. Moreover, the

youngest and the oldest groups showed large misinformation ef

fects. Put another way, the very

young and the elderly were signifi

cantly more accurate when not mis

informed than when misinformed, a

result that is consistent with other

age effects in the literature on epi sodic memory. The article describ

ing the study also reviews relevant literature on individual differences in susceptibility to misinformation.5

WHAT HAPPENS TO THE ORIGINAL MEMORY?

An important issue that has been

debated is whether misinformation

actually impairs a person's ability to

remember details of an event. Put

another way, are memory traces al

tered by postevent misinformation?

There are several ways in which mis

information could impair memory.

First, misinformation could cause

trace impairment; that is, it could

update or alter the previously formed memory. New information

could combine with earlier traces to

change the representation. Second, misinformation could cause retrieval

impairment; that is, misinformation could make the original memory trace less accessible without altering it.6 Impairment of some sort is im

plied by either the trace impair ment or the retrieval impairment mechanism.

Some theorists have rejected the notion that misinformation impairs

memory. McCloskey and Zaragoza7 disagreed with the idea that the mis

information effect is due to recoding processes or updating of previously stored memories or arises because inhibition or suppression renders the

older memory less accessible. Mc

Closkey and Zaragoza argued in

stead that the misinformation does not affect memory at all, but merely influences the reports of subjects

who have never encoded (or do not

recall) the original event. Instead of

guessing blindly, these subjects use

the misinformation to decide what to

report as their memory. Misinforma tion effects could also be obtained if

subjects remember both sources of information but select the mislead

ing information because they con

clude it must be correct.

Several lines of evidence support the notion that misinformation occa

sionally does impair the ability to re member original details, however. One kind of evidence involves stud

ies using tests that do not permit the

misinformation option. Say a subject

originally saw a stop sign, but it was

later referred to as a yield sign. Sup pose we now give the subject a test

that does not permit the selection of the yield sign (e.g., the choice is be tween a stop sign and a no-parking

sign). If the misinformation has im

paired memory for the stop sign, then the misinformed subjects

would be less likely to remember the

stop sign than the control subjects. If

there has been no memory impair ment due to misinformation, then

misled subjects would be expected to be as accurate as control subjects on a test of this type. Although some

Published by Cambridge University Press

CURRENT DIRECTIONS IN PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE 123

studies do show equal performance, there are several published demon

strations of deficits in performance with this restrictive type of test. One

study4 presented preschool children

with stories and found impairment

following misinformation. Another

study8 presented adult subjects with

visual scenes (e.g., nature scenes in

cluding ponds, flowers, mountains) and then provided similar visual

scenes as postevent information.

Subjects who received misinforma

tion were less able than control sub

jects to discriminate the original scenes from novel distractors.

A second line of work supporting a memory impairment interpretation involves the use of a yes-no test.9

Belli showed subjects a simulated

crime via slides and then fed them

some misinformation via a postevent narrative that they read under a pre tense. Finally, subjects were pre sented with a series of statements, each dealing with a critical item

from the crime. Subjects said "yes" if they saw the item in the slides and

"no" otherwise. Compared with

memories for control items, there

was a large reduction in accurate

memory for the items about which

subjects had received misinforma

tion. The large reduction was not

offset by the small improvement in

memory for completely novel items.

Other lines of research that are

consistent with memory impairment involve implicit memory testing10

and logic-of-opposition procedures (described in the next section). Al

though any of these findings might be readily explained by alternative

interpretations, taken together, these

studies support the idea that misin

formation can impair a subject's

ability to remember original details.

DO PEOPLE GENUINELY BELIEVE IN

THE MISINFORMATION?

One reason to think that subjects

truly believe in their misinformation

memories is that they often express these memories with a great deal of

confidence. But how can we rule

out the possibility that subjects re

port misinformation memories to ap

pear observant or prove they are

"good" subjects? The logic-of-opposition para

digm, developed by Jacoby and ap

plied to the study of misleading sug

gestions by Lindsay,11 provides an

ideal means of assessing what sub

jects really believe. By instructing his subjects that any information

contained in the postevent narrative

was wrong and should not be re

ported on the test, Lindsay set the

tendency to report suggested details

in opposition to the ability to re

member the details from the

postevent narrative. Put another

way, he tried to offset subjects' ten

dency to want to report an item they remembered reading by harshly

warning the subjects not to report

anything they remembered from the

reading. If subjects continued to

base their test responses on sug

gested items, despite explicit in

structions against doing so, Lindsay could conclude that misled subjects truly believe that they saw the sug

gested details at the time of the ini

tial event. In fact, Lindsay obtained

such results. He first showed an

event via slides, and later provided misinformation about some items.

Misinformed subjects who saw the

slides and read the narrative in the same session claimed to have seen

the misinformation in the slides 27%

of the time, compared with 9%

for subjects who had not been

misinformed.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

Misleading information can turn a

lie into memory's truth. It can cause

people to believe that they saw

things that never really existed, or

that they saw things differently from

the way things actually were. It can

make people confident about these

false memories and also, apparently,

impair earlier recollections. Once

adopted, the newly created memo

ries can be believed as strongly as

genuine memories. If handled skill

fully, the power of misinformation is

so enormous and sufficiently con

trollable that a colleague and I re

cently postulated a not-too-distant

"brave new world" in which misin

formation researchers would be able

to proclaim: "

'Give us a dozen

healthy memories . . . and our own

specified world to handle them in.

And we'll guarantee to take any one

at random and train it to become any

type of memory that we might select . . . regardless of its origin or the

brain that holds it.' "12

The implica tions of these findings for the legal field, for advertising, for political persuasion, and for clinical settings are far-reaching.

Notes

1. The author's research described in this article was supported by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Science Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Transportation.

2. E.F. Loftus, Eyewitness Testimony (Harvard

University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1979). 3. E.F. Loftus and H.C. Hoffman, Misinforma

tion and memory: The creation of new memories, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 118, 100-104(1989).

4. S.J. Ceci, D.F. Ross, and M.P. Toglia, Sug gestibility of children's memory: Psycholegal impli cations, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Gen

eral, 7 76,38-49(1987). 5. E.F. Loftus, B. Levidow, and S. Duensing,

Who remembers best? Individual differences in

memory for events that occurred in a science mu

seum, Applied Cognitive Psychology, 6, 93-107

(1992). 6. J. Morton, R.H. Hammersley, and D.A. Be

kerian, Headed records: A model for memory and its failures, Cognition, 20, 1-23 (1985).

7. M. McCloskey and M. Zaragoza, Misleading postevent information and memory for events: Ar

guments and evidence against memory impairment hypotheses, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 114, 1-16(1985).

8. C.C. Chandler, How memory for an event is influenced by related events: Interference in modi fied recognition tests, Journal of Experimental Psy chology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 17, 115-125(1991).

9. R.F. Belli, Influences of misleading postevent information: Misinformation interference and ac

ceptance, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Gen

eral, 7 78,72-85(1989). 10. E.F. Loftus, Made in memory, in The Psy

chology of Learning and Motivation, Vol. 27, G.

Bower, Ed. (Academic Press, Orlando, FL, 1991). 11. D.S. Lindsay, Misleading suggestions can

impair eyewitnesses' ability to remember event de

tails, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 76, 1077-1083 (1990).

12. Loftus and Hoffman, note 3, p. 103.

Copyright ? 1992 American Psychological Society

CURRENT DIRECTIONS IN PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE

The Confidence of Eyewitnesses in Their Identifications From Lineups Gary L. Wells,1 Elizabeth A. Olson, and Steve D. Charman

Psychology Department, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa

Abstract

The confidence that eyewit nesses express in their lineup identifications of criminal sus

pects has a large impact on

criminal proceedings. Many convictions of innocent people can be attributed in large part to confident but mistaken eye

witnesses. Although reason

able correlations between

confidence and accuracy can

be obtained under certain con

ditions, confidence is governed

by some factors that are unre

lated to accuracy. An under

standing of these confidence

factors helps establish the con

ditions under which confi

dence and accuracy are related

and leads to important practi cal recommendations for crimi

nal justice proceedings.

Keywords

eyewitness testimony; lineups;

eyewitness memory

Mistaken identification by eye witnesses was the primary evi

dence used to convict innocent

people whose convictions were

later overturned by forensic DNA

tests (Scheck, Neufeld, & Dwyer, 2000; Wells et al, 1998). The eye

witnesses in these cases were very

persuasive because on the witness

stand they expressed extremely

high confidence that they had iden

tified the actual perpetrator. Long before DNA exoneration cases be

gan unfolding in the 1990s, how

ever, eyewitness researchers in

psychology were finding that con

fidence is not a reliable indicator of

accuracy and warning the justice

system that heavy reliance on eye witness's confidence in their iden

tifications might lead to the convic

tion of innocent people. Studies have consistently dem

onstrated that the confidence an

eyewitness expresses in an identifi

cation is the major factor determin

ing whether people will believe

that the eyewitness made an accu

rate identification. The confidence

an eyewitness expresses is also en

shrined in the criteria that the U.S.

Supreme Court used 30 years ago

(and that now guide lower courts) for deciding the accuracy of an eye

witness's identification in a land

mark case. Traditionally, much of

the experimental work examining the relation between confidence

and accuracy in eyewitness identi

fication tended to frame the ques tion as "What is the correlation be

tween confidence and accuracy?" as

though there were some single, true

correlation value. Today, eyewitness researchers regard the confidence

accuracy relation as something that

varies across circumstances. Some

of these circumstances are outside

the control of the criminal justice

system, but some are determined

by the procedures that criminal jus tice personnel control.

A GENERAL FRAMEWORK FOR CONFIDENCE

ACCURACY RELATIONS

It has been fruitful to think

about eyewitness accuracy and

eyewitness confidence as variables

that are influenced by numerous

factors, some of which are the same

and some of which are different.

We expect confidence and accuracy to be more closely related when the

variables that are influencing accu

racy are also influencing confi

dence than when the variables in

fluencing accuracy are different

from those influencing confidence.

Consider, for instance, the variable

of exposure duration (i.e., how

long the eyewitness viewed the

culprit while the crime was com

mitted). An eyewitness who

viewed the culprit for a long time

during the crime should be more

accurate than one who had only a

brief view. Furthermore, the longer view could be a foundation for the

eyewitness to feel more confident

in the identification, either because

the witness has a more vivid and

fluent memory from the longer du

ration or because the witness infers

his or her accuracy from the long

exposure duration. Hence, the cor

relation between confidence and

accuracy should be higher the more variation there is in the expo

sure duration across witnesses

(Read, Vokey, & Hammersley, 1990). Suppose, however, that

some eyewitnesses were reinforced

after their identification decision

(e.g., "Good job. You are a good witness."), whereas others were

given no such reinforcement. Such

postidentification reinforcement does nothing to make witnesses

more accurate, but dramatically in

flates their confidence (Wells &

Bradfield, 1999).

Eyewitness confidence can be

construed simply as the eyewit ness's belief, which varies in de

gree, about whether the identifica

tion was accurate or not. This belief can have various sources, both in

ternal and external, that need not

be related to accuracy. Shaw and

his colleagues, for example, have

shown that repeated questioning of

eyewitnesses about mistaken mem

ories does not make the memories

Copyright ? 2002 American Psychological Society 151

152 VOLUME 11, NUMBER 5, OCTOBER 2002

more accurate but does inflate the

eyewitnesses' confidence in those

memories (Shaw, 1996; Shaw &

McLure, 1996). Although the pre cise mechanisms for the repeated

questioning effect are not clear

(e.g., increased commitment to the

mistaken memory vs. increased

fluidity of the response), these re

sults illustrate a dissociation be

tween variables affecting confi

dence and variables affecting

accuracy.

It is useful to think about broad

classes of variables that could be

expected to drive confidence and

not accuracy, or to drive accuracy and not confidence, or to drive

both variables. It is even possible to

think about variables that could

decrease accuracy while increas

ing confidence. Consider, for in

stance, coincidental resemblance.

Mistaken identifications from line

ups occur primarily when the ac

tual culprit is not in the lineup.

Suppose there are two such line

ups, one in which the innocent sus

pect does not highly resemble the

real culprit and a second in which

the innocent suspect is a near clone

(coincidental resemblance) of the

real culprit. The second lineup will

result not only in an increased rate

of mistaken identification com

pared with the first lineup, but also

in higher confidence in that mis

take. In this case, a variable that de

creases accuracy (resemblance of an

innocent suspect to the actual cul

prit) serves to increase confidence.

THE CORRELATION, CALIBRATION, AND

INFLATION OF CONFIDENCE

Although many individual stud

ies have reported little or no rela

tion between eyewitnesses' confi

dence in their identifications and

the accuracy of their identifica

tions, an analysis that statistically combined individual studies indi

cates that the confidence-accuracy correlation might be as high as

+ .40 when the analysis is restricted

to individuals who make an identi

fication (vs. all witnesses; see

Sporer, Penrod, Read, & Cutler,

1995). How useful is this correla

tion for predicting accuracy from

confidence? In some ways, a corre

lation of .40 could be considered

strong. For instance, when overall

accuracy is 50%, a .40 correlation

would translate into 70% of the

witnesses with high confidence be

ing accurate and only 30% of the

witnesses with low confidence be

ing accurate. As accuracy deviates

from 50%, however, differences in

accuracy rates between witnesses

with high and low confidence will

diminish even though the correla

tion remains .40.

Another way to think about a

.40 correlation is to compare it with

something that people experience in daily life, namely the correlation

between a person's height and a per son's gender. Extrapolating from

males' and females' average height and standard deviation (69.1, 63.7, and 5.4 in., respectively; Department of Health and Human Services,

n.d.) yields a correlation between

height and gender of +.43. Notice

that the correlation between height and gender is quite similar to the

correlation between eyewitnesses' identification confidence and accu

racy. Thus, if eyewitnesses' identi

fications are accurate 50% of the

time, we would expect to encoun

ter a highly confident mistaken eye witness (or a nonconfident accu

rate eyewitness) about as often as

we would encounter a tall female

(or a short male).

Although the eyewitness-identi fication literature has generally used correlation methods to ex

press the statistical association be

tween confidence and accuracy, it

is probably more forensically valid

to use calibration and overconfi

dence/underconfidence measures

rather than correlations (Brewer,

Keast, & Rishworth, 2002; Juslin, Olson, & Winman, 1996). In effect, the correlation method (specifically,

point-biserial correlation) expresses the degree of statistical associa

tion by calculating the difference in

confidence (expressed in terms of

the standard deviation) between

accurate and inaccurate witnesses.

Calibration, on the other hand, as

sesses the extent to which an eye witness's confidence, expressed as

a percentage, matches the probabil

ity that the eyewitness is correct.

Overconfidence reflects the extent

to which the percentage confidence

exceeds the probability that the eye witness is correct (e.g., 80% confi

dence and 60% probability correct), and underconfidence reflects the

extent to which the percentage con

fidence underestimates the proba

bility that the eyewitness is correct

(e.g., 40% confidence and 60%

probability correct). Juslin et al.

pointed out that the confidence

accuracy correlation can be quite low even when calibration is high.

Work by Juslin et al. (1996) indi

cates that eyewitnesses can be well

calibrated at times, but recent ex

periments (Wells & Bradfield,

1999) illustrate a problem that can

arise when trying to use percent

age confidence expressed by wit nesses to infer the probability that

their identifications are accurate. In

a series of experiments, eyewit nesses were induced to make mis

taken identifications from lineups in which the culprit was absent

and were then randomly assigned to receive confirming "feedback"

telling them that they identified the

actual suspect or to receive no

feedback at all. Later, these wit

nesses were asked how certain

they were at the time of their iden

tification (i.e., how certain they were before the feedback). Those

who did not receive confirming feedback gave average confidence

ratings of less than 50%, but those

receiving confirming feedback

gave average confidence ratings of

Published by Blackwell Publishing Inc.

CURRENT DIRECTIONS IN PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE 153

over 70%. Because all of these eye witnesses had made mistaken

identifications, even the no-feed

back witnesses were overconfi

dent, but the confirming-feedback witnesses were especially overcon

fident. Confidence inflation is a dif

ficult problem in actual criminal cases because eyewitnesses

are

commonly given feedback about

whether their identification deci

sions agree with the investigator's

theory of the case. In these cases, it

is the detective, rather than the eye witness, who determines the confi

dence of the eyewitness.

Confirming feedback not only inflates confidence, thereby induc

ing overconfidence, but also harms

the confidence-accuracy

correla

tion. When eyewitnesses are given

confirming feedback following their identification decisions, the

confidence of inaccurate eyewit nesses is inflated more than is the

confidence of accurate eyewit nesses, and the net result is a re

duction in the confidence-accuracy correlation (Bradfield, Wells, & Ol

son, 2002). Hence, although the

confidence of an eyewitness can

have utility if it is assessed inde

pendently of external influences (e.g., comments from the detective, learn

ing about what other eyewitnesses have said), the legal system rarely assesses confidence in this way.

IMPACT ON POLICIES AND PRACTICES

What impact has research on the

confidence-accuracy problem had on the legal system? Until rela

tively recently, the impact has been almost nil. However, when DNA

exoneration cases began unfolding in the mid-1990s, U.S. Attorney

General Janet Reno initiated a

study of the causes of these miscar

riages of justice. More than three

fourths of these convictions of in nocent persons involved mistaken

eyewitness identifications, and, in

every case, the mistaken eyewit nesses were extremely confident

and, therefore, persuasive at trial

(Wells et al., 1998). A Department of Justice panel used the psycho

logical literature to issue the first

set of national guidelines on col

lecting eyewitness identification

evidence (Technical Working

Group for Eyewitness Evidence,

1999). One of the major recommen

dations was that the confidence of

the eyewitness be assessed at the time of the identification, before

there is any chance for it to be in

fluenced by external factors.

The state of New Jersey has

gone even further in adopting the

recommendations of eyewitness researchers. Based on findings from the psychological literature,

guidelines from the attorney gen eral of New Jersey now call for

double-blind testing with lineups. Double-blind lineup testing means

that the person who administers

the lineup does not know which

person in the lineup is the suspect and which ones are merely fillers.

Under the New Jersey procedures, the confidence expressed by the

eyewitness will be based primarily on the eyewitness's memory, not on the expectations of or feedback

from the lineup administrator.

There is growing evidence that

the legal system is now beginning to read and use the psychological literature on eyewitnesses to for

mulate policies and procedures. The 2002 report of Illinois Gover nor George Ryan's Commission on

Capital Punishment is the latest ex

ample of this new reliance on the

psychological literature. The com

mission specifically cited the litera ture on the problem with confi

dence inflation and recommended

double-blind testing and explicit

recording of confidence state ments at the time of the identifica tion to prevent or detect confidence

inflation (Illinois Commission on

Capital Punishment, 2002).

NEW DIRECTIONS

Although the psychological lit

erature on eyewitness identifica

tion has done much to clarify the

confidence-accuracy issue and

specify some conditions under

which confidence might be predic tive of accuracy, research has

started to turn to other indicators

that might prove even more pre dictive of accuracy. One of the

most promising examples is the re

lation between the amount of time an eyewitness takes to make an

identification and the accuracy of

the identification. Eyewitnesses who make their identification deci sion quickly (in 10 s or less) are

considerably more likely to be ac

curate than are eyewitnesses who

take longer (e.g., Dunning & Per

retta, in press). Confidence is a self

report that is subject to distortion

(e.g., from postidentification feed

back), whereas decision time is a

behavior that can be directly ob

served. Hence, decision time might prove more reliable than confi

dence as an indicator of eyewitness

accuracy. Yet another new direc

tion in eyewitness identification re

search concerns cases in which there are multiple eyewitnesses.

Recent analyses show that the be

haviors of eyewitnesses who do not identify the suspect from a

lineup can be used to assess the

likely accuracy of the eyewitnesses who do identify the suspect from a

lineup (Wells & Olson, in press). The future of eyewitness identifica tion research is a bright one, and the legal system now seems to be

paying attention.

Recommended Reading

Cutler, B.L., & Penrod, S.D. (1995). Mistaken identification: The eyewit ness, psychology, and the law. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Scheck, B., Neufeld, P., & Dwyer, J.

(2000). (See References)

Copyright ? 2002 American Psychological Society

154 VOLUME 11, NUMBER 5, OCTOBER 2002

Wells, G.L., Malpass, R.S., Lindsay,

R.C.L., Fisher, R.P., Turtle, J.W., &

Fulero, S. (2000). From the lab to the police station: A successful ap

plication of eyewitness research.

American Psychologist, 55,581-598.

Note

1. Address correspondence to Gary L. Wells, Psychology Department, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50011; e-mail: glwells@iastate.edu.

References

Bradfield, S.L., Wells, G.L., & Olson, E.A. (2002). The damaging effect of confirming feedback on the relation between eyewitness certainty and identification accuracy. Journal of Applied

Psychology, 87,112-120.

Brewer, N., Keast, A., & Rishworth, A. (2002). Im

proving the confidence-accuracy relation in

eyewitness identification: Evidence from cor

relation and calibration. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 8,44-56.

Department of Health and Human Services, Na tional Center for Health Statistics, (n.d.). Na tional Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.

Retrieved May 22, 2002, from http:// www.cdc.gov/nchs/about/major/nhanes/ datatblelink.htm#unpubtab

Dunning, D., & Perretta, S. (in press). Automatic

ity and eyewitness accuracy: A 10 - to -12 sec

ond rule for distinguishing accurate from inaccurate positive identifications. Journal of

Applied Psychology.

Illinois Commission on Capital Punishment. (2002,

April). Report of the Governor's Commission on

Capital Punishment. Retrieved April 23, 2002, from http://www.idoc.state.il.us/ccp/ccp/ reports / commission_report/

Juslin, P., Olson, N., & Winman, A. (1996). Calibra tion and diagnosticity of confidence in eyewit

ness identification: Comments on what can

and cannot be inferred from a low confidence

accuracy correlation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 5, 1304-1316.

Read, J.D., Vokey, J.R., & Hammersley, R. (1990).

Changing photos of faces: Effects of exposure duration and photo similarity on recognition and the accuracy-confidence relationship. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning,

Memory, and Cognition, 16,870-882.

Scheck, B., Neufeld, P., & Dwyer, J. (2000). Actual innocence. New York: Random House.

Shaw, J.S., III. (1996). Increases in eyewitness con

fidence resulting from postevent questioning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 2, 126-146.

Shaw, J.S., III, & McClure, K.A. (1996). Repeated postevent questioning can lead to elevated lev els of eyewitness confidence. Law and Human

Behavior, 20,629-654.

Sporer, S., Penrod, S., Read, D., & Cutler, B.L.

(1995). Choosing, confidence, and accuracy: A

meta-analysis of the confidence-accuracy rela tion in eyewitness identification studies. Psy chological Bulletin, 118,315-327.

Technical Working Group for Eyewitness Evi dence. (1999). Eyewitness evidence: A guide for law enforcement. Washington, DC: U.S. Depart

ment of Justice, Office of Justice Programs.

Wells, G.L., & Bradfield, A.L. (1999). Distortions in

eyewitnesses' recollections: Can the postiden tification-feedback effect be moderated? Psy chological Science, 10,138-144.

Wells, G.L., & Olson, E.A. (in press). Eyewitness identification: Information gain from incrimi

nating and exonerating behaviors. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied.

Wells, G.L., Small, M, Penrod, S., Malpass, R.S., Fulero, S.M., & Brimacombe, C.A.E. (1998).

Eyewitness identification procedures: Recom mendations for lineups and photospreads. Law and Human Behavior, 22,603-647.

Evolutionary Psychology of Facial Attractiveness Bernhard Fink1 and Ian Penton-Voak

Ludwig-Boltzmann-Institute for Urban Ethology, Vienna, Austria (B.F.), and Department of Psychology, University of Stirling, Stirling, Scotland,

United Kingdom (I.P.-V.)

Abstract

The human face communi

cates an impressive number of

visual signals. Although adults' ratings of facial attrac

tiveness are consistent across

studies, even cross-culturally, there has been considerable

controversy surrounding at

tempts to identify the facial

features that cause faces to be

judged attractive or unattrac

tive. Studies of physical attrac

tiveness have attempted to

identify the features that con

tribute to attractiveness by

studying the relationships be

tween attractiveness and (a)

symmetry, (b) averageness, and (c) nonaverage sexually di

morphic features (hormone

markers). Evolutionary psy

chology proposes that these

characteristics all pertain to

health, suggesting that humans

have evolved to view certain

features as attractive because

they were displayed by healthy individuals. However, the

question remains how single features that are considered at

tractive relate to each other, and

if they form a single ornament

that signals mate quality. Moreover, some researchers

have recently explained attrac

tiveness preferences in terms

of individual differences that

are predictable. This article

briefly describes what is cur

rently known from attractive

ness research, reviews some

recent advances, and suggests areas for future researchers' at

tention.

Keywords face; attractiveness; mate choice;

evolutionary psychology

An obsession with beauty is not

unique to modern Western culture

but can be found around the world

in almost all societies that have

been studied. Several studies have

shown that members of different

ethnic groups share common attrac

tiveness standards, suggesting that

the constituents of beauty are neither

Published by Blackwell Publishing Inc.

Eyewitness Identification

Neil Brewer1 and Gary L. Wells2

1 Flinders University and 2 Iowa State University

AbstractEyewitness identifications play an important role in many police investigations and courtroom decisions. Identification decisionaccuracy is shaped not only by the quality of a witness’s memory but also by social-influence variables. Some variables can be categor-ized as general impairments, whereas others produce biases against a specific suspect. We review some of the key variables in eachcategory and consider postidentification indicators of identification accuracy. Finally, we highlight what we think are some of the majordirections for future research. These include addressing some of the significant limitations of past research, examining variables that arenot directly related to memory or social influence, and developing some radical new directions for identification tests.

Keywordseyewitness identification, eyewitness memory, confidence

Witnesses to crimes are sometimes asked to view a police

lineup to see if they can identify the culprit. Using experimen-

tally created events, psychological researchers have long

warned that eyewitness identification evidence is less reliable

than people seem to believe. Corroborating the concerns of

psychologists, since the advent of forensic DNA testing in

the 1990s, 258 people convicted by juries in the United States

have been freed based on exculpatory DNA tests, and 200 of

these were cases of mistaken eyewitness identification (Inno-

cence Project, 2010). Examination of the reasons for these

mistaken identifications has provided rich avenues of investi-

gation guided by cognitive and social perspectives. Here we

focus on (a) variables that produce general impairments of

identification accuracy, (b) postidentification indicators of

identification accuracy, and (c) variables that result in biases

against the suspect.

General Impairments of IdentificationPerformance

Numerous variables have been shown to shape (a) whether

witnesses make positive or negative lineup decisions (i.e.,

choices or rejections) and (b) the accuracy of those decisions.

Not surprisingly, witnesses are likely to assume that the culprit

is in the lineup; when explicitly warned that the lineup may or

may not contain the culprit, witnesses are less likely to make a

selection (Brewer & Wells, 2006). Identification accuracy is

impaired under encoding conditions likely to undermine mem-

ory strength, such as divided attention, short exposure duration,

and long viewing distance (e.g., Lindsay, Semmler, Weber,

Brewer, & Lindsay, 2008; Palmer, Brewer, McKinnon, &

Weber, 2010). Some conditions, such as identifying a culprit

of a different race or one who was wearing a disguise (e.g.,

Meissner & Brigham, 2001), undermine encoding and/or

lineup discrimination performance. Other conditions such as

lengthy retention intervals are associated with diminished

memory strength (Deffenbacher, Bornstein, McGorty, & Pen-

rod, 2008).

Indicators of Identification Accuracy

Because an identification decision is often the key evidence

against a suspect, characteristics of identification decisions that

might discriminate accurate from inaccurate decisions have

been explored. Decision confidence (Brewer & Wells, 2006),

latency (Weber, Brewer, Wells, Semmler, & Keast, 2004) and

phenomenological reports (Palmer et al., 2010) have all been

found to discriminate for positive decisions but not for lineup

rejections. Highly confident decisions, rapid decisions, and

decisions accompanied by relevant recollection (i.e., recall of

contextual information relevant to discriminating the culprit)

are more likely to be accurate than are decisions made with low

confidence, slowly, or without relevant recollection.

Although we cannot specify absolute latencies or amounts

of relevant recollection associated with accurate decisions,

Corresponding Author:

Neil Brewer, School of Psychology, Flinders University, GPO Box 2100,

Adelaide, S. Aust 5001, Australia

E-mail: neil.brewer@flinders.edu.au

Current Directions in PsychologicalScience20(1) 24-27ª The Author(s) 2011Reprints and permission:sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navDOI: 10.1177/0963721410389169http://cdps.sagepub.com

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eyewitness confidence can provide a valuable pointer to the

accuracy of an individual identification decision. It is not

uncommon for psychologists to express the view that there is

no meaningful relation between confidence and accuracy for

identifications, a position based on the usually modest (at best)

confidence–accuracy (CA) correlations that have been

reported. However, recent research has shown that the CA cor-

relation does not provide a comprehensive picture of the CA

relation. Researchers who have used a calibration approach

(which involves charting the proportion of accurate responses

for each confidence level) to assess the CA relation across a

variety of stimuli, exposure and attention conditions, and reten-

tion intervals, have shown that, when measured immediately

after an identification, confidence does provide a meaningful

guide as to the likely accuracy of decisions made by adult (but

not child) witnesses (Brewer & Wells, 2006; Keast, Brewer, &

Wells, 2007; Sauer, Brewer, Zweck, & Weber, 2010)—a find-

ing that is at odds with oft-stated positions in the literature.

These research outcomes signal that police investigators should

attend carefully to witness confidence when evaluating

whether an identified suspect warrants continued investigation

or whether they should perhaps target other possible suspects.

Confidence is not, however, an infallible index of accuracy.

The calibration research summarized above indicates that,

under many conditions, very high levels of confidence may

exceed the probability of an accurate identification, with confi-

dence levels of 90% to 100% often associated with lower accu-

racy rates around 75% to 90%. Further, as we discuss later,

confidence breaks down as a marker of accuracy under certain

conditions.

Variables Known to ProduceSpecific Suspect Biases

Eyewitness researchers have found it useful to distinguish

between variables that impact general performance (as in the

previous section) and variables that create a specific bias

against the suspect (Wells & Loftus, 2003). Poor lighting con-

ditions or cross-racial identification situations, for example,

impair eyewitness identification performance, but no more so

for one member of a lineup (e.g., one of the fillers) than for

another (e.g., the suspect). Of course, the suspect might or

might not be the perpetrator, so any factors that bias witness

responses toward the suspect are of great concern. Psycholo-

gists have long called for double-blind lineups to prevent the

lineup administrator from inadvertently cueing the witness

toward the suspect (Wells, 1988), but only recently have

experiments more carefully teased apart these cueing dynamics

(Clark, Marshall, & Rosenthal, 2009; Greathouse & Kovera,

2009). A powerful suspect-bias influence can also occur after

the witness makes an identification if the witness receives con-

firming feedback (e.g., ‘‘Good, you identified the suspect’’).

Confirming postidentification feedback dramatically inflates

witnesses’ reports of their certainty, view, attention, and other

variables (Semmler, Brewer, & Wells, 2004; Wells, Olson, &

Charman, 2003). Of course, an innocent suspect can stand out

in a lineup for a variety of reasons, including the presence of

fillers who do not fit the description of the culprit. But there are

other variables that create bias against a suspect, such as mis-

attributed familiarity. Misattributed familiarity can occur

because of repeated identification procedures such as having

seen the person in a mugshot search prior to a lineup or confus-

ing a bystander with the perpetrator.

Understanding suspect-bias variables is an important direc-

tion in eyewitness identification research. In virtually every

trial involving contested eyewitness identification, the to-be-

explained issue is not merely why the witness has a weak mem-

ory or whether witnesses are unreliable. Instead, the question

is, ‘‘Why did the witness choose the suspect, rather than one

of the fillers, from the lineup?’’ General impairment variables

play an important role, but only suspect-bias variables answer

that question. Research examining this latter category of vari-

ables has yielded many practical guidelines for lineup conduct

(Wells, Memon, & Penrod, 2006).

Some Major Directions

We identify four main research directions that we believe can

advance this field. The first is not at all exciting, as it will

involve researchers going back over some old ground. There

is a tendency in this field to speak with certainty about the vari-

ables that explain the variations in identification performance.

Yet we are not convinced that the knowledge base is as robust

as is sometimes assumed. Traditionally, eyewitness identifica-

tion experiments yield one data point per subject from either a

culprit-present or a culprit-absent condition. Even with what

may appear to be large sample sizes for psychology experi-

ments, statistical power is a major, and often underestimated,

issue, as has been clearly demonstrated by Brewer, Weber, and

Semmler (2005). Additionally, the levels sampled for the inde-

pendent variables are necessarily restricted, as is the range of

stimuli sampled. Meta-analyses can address some of these

issues, but when studies that have employed a same–different

face recognition paradigm (to provide stimulus variability and

more data points) are set aside, there are very few identification

test studies examining specific variables (e.g., exposure dura-

tion). These limitations mean that we do not have detailed

knowledge about the influence of individual variables or the

likely complex interactions between variables, a point illu-

strated by Lindsay et al.’s (2008) field study, using multiple sti-

muli, of the effects of viewing distance (and other variables) on

identification performance. One impediment to the sorts of

studies we are calling for might appear to be the capacity to

access sufficiently large participant samples. Several recent

field studies (e.g., Lindsay et al., 2008; Sauer et al., 2010)

reveal some effective and relatively inexpensive solutions to

this problem.

Second, there is a relative dearth of work examining the

interactions between general-impairment variables and

suspect-bias variables. An emerging theoretical view is that

suspect-bias variables have a more powerful influence when

general-impairment variables are present (Charman & Wells,

Eyewitness Identification 25

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2006). In recent years, computational modeling has been

applied to lineup identification behaviors, and this has been

useful in fleshing out the assumptions behind some of the

‘‘mini-theories’’ that have been used to explain eyewitness

identification errors (Clark, 2008). With a better data base of

how general impairment variables and suspect-bias variables

interact, these computational models could become more

sophisticated and lead to better theories.

Third, there is an emerging type of research that is very

important to eyewitness identification evidence in the real

world that is not directly related to memory or to social influ-

ence yet is being conducted by psychologists. One example

of such research concerns the influence of the base rate for

which the actual culprit is in the lineup (e.g., does the culprit

appear in 90% of lineups or 50% of lineups?). Psychologists

have drawn attention to the fact that this base rate is an

important factor in the chances of mistaken identification.

Two other examples of important nonmemory variables rele-

vant to mistaken identification have also been identified

recently. One is the problem of estimating likelihoods of guilt

based on the consistent and inconsistent behaviors of multiple

witnesses to the same event. Clark and Wells (2008) used

data from a wide variety of experiments to estimate how

probabilities of guilt rise and fall as a function of agreement

and disagreement among witnesses in their lineup identifica-

tions. More work needs to be done to take account of nonin-

dependence among witnesses. Another example is the

‘‘pleading effect,’’ which results in vastly different chances

of mistaken identifications to be expected at the lineup versus

in the courtroom. Wells et al. (2006) noted that 85% of guilty

suspects in the United States plead guilty. Therefore, suppose

95% of suspects who are identified from lineups are guilty

and 5% are innocent. The pleading effect means that 85%of the 95% guilty will not go to trial whereas almost 100%of the 5% innocent will go to trial rather than plead guilty.

Hence, the proportion of identified suspects going to trial

who are innocent would be greater than 33%. These are not

memory variables, but they are important to study because

they have a great impact on our understanding of how to cal-

culate the chances of mistaken identifications surfacing at

various junctures in the justice system.

Fourth, with the exception of the development of sequential

lineup (in which the witness views one lineup member at a

time; Lindsay & Wells, 1985), the eyewitness identification

research paradigm has seldom departed from the traditional

simultaneous lineup (i.e., all lineup members appear together)

used by police in criminal investigations. The extant lineup

paradigm demands that witnesses either choose from among

the members of the lineup or reject them, a decision that is

influenced by an array of social and metacognitive variables

independent of the witness’ memory strength and the degree

of match between their memory and the lineup members.

Although research has identified a number of procedural vari-

ables that can reduce error in the traditional lineup, experimen-

tal psychologists should be able to develop alternative

procedures that provide a more sensitive index of the likelihood

that the suspect is indeed the culprit. One example of such a

procedure is Sauer, Brewer, and Weber’s (2008) use of patterns

of witnesses’ confidence judgments to indicate the lineup

member who most resembles the culprit and whether that per-

son is the offender. Classification algorithms exploiting the

confidence judgments assigned to each lineup member were

used to identify a confidence criterion that optimized the clas-

sification of witnesses’ responses as accurate or inaccurate.

This approach produced culprit-present and culprit-absent

accuracy rates that exceeded the accuracy of the traditional bin-

ary identification test decision.

A likely reaction to such radical approaches is that police

and the courts would never accept a form of identification evi-

dence that doesn’t actually involve the witness picking, or

rejecting, the suspect. Our response is that any procedure that

reduces the likelihood that culprits go free and innocent people

are convicted warrants serious attention from a research per-

spective and from the perspective of giving away psychological

science.

Recommended Reading

Brewer, N., & Weber, N. (2008). Eyewitness confidence and latency:

Indices of memory processes not just markers of accuracy. Applied

Cognitive Psychology, 22, 827–840. A position paper arguing for a

focus on eyewitness decision confidence and latency in theory

development about eyewitness memory.

Brewer, N., Weber, N., & Semmler, C. (2005). (See References).

A chapter that reviews the eyewitness identification literature and

highlights some key methodological issues.

Brewer, N., & Wells, G.L. (2006). (See References). An article apply-

ing the confidence–accuracy calibration approach to eyewitness

identification.

Sauer, J.D., Brewer, N., & Weber, N. (2008). (See References). An

article examining a radical alternative to the traditional eyewitness

identification task.

Wells, G.L., & Quinlivan, D.S. (2009). Suggestive eyewitness identi-

fication procedures and the Supreme Court’s reliability test in light

of eyewitness science: 30 years later. Law and Human Behavior,

33, 1–24. An extensive review of suggestive influences on eyewit-

ness identification and how the findings call into question the U.S.

Supreme Court’s 33-year-old law on how courts should evaluate

eyewitness identification evidence.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared that they had no conflicts of interest with respect

to their authorship or the publication of this article.

Funding

This research was supported by Australian Research Council Grants

DP0556876 and DP1093210 to the first author and National Science

Foundation Grant SES0850401 to the second author.

References

Brewer, N., Weber, N., & Semmler, C. (2005). Eyewitness identifica-

tion. In N. Brewer & K.D. Williams (Eds.), Psychology and law:

An empirical perspective (pp. 177–221). New York, NY: Guilford.

26 Brewer, Wells

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Brewer, N., & Wells, G.L. (2006). The confidence-accuracy

relationship in eyewitness identification: Effects of lineup instruc-

tions, foil similarity and target-absent base rates. Journal of

Experimental Psychology: Applied, 12, 11–30.

Charman, S.D., & Wells, G.L. (2006). Applied lineup theory. In

R.C.L. Lindsay, D.F. Ross, J.D. Read & M.P. Toglia (Eds.), Hand-

book of eyewitness psychology (Vol. 2, pp. 219–254). Mahwah, NJ:

Erlbaum.

Clark, S.E. (2008). The importance of computational modelling for

eyewitness identification research. Applied Cognitive Psychology,

22, 803–813.

Clark, S.E., Marshall, T.E., & Rosenthal, R. (2009). Lineup adminis-

trator influences on eyewitness identification decisions. Journal of

Experimental Psychology: Applied, 15, 63–75.

Clark, S.E., & Wells, G.L. (2008). On the diagnosticity of

multiple-witness identifications. Law and Human Behavior,

32, 406–422.

Deffenbacher, K.A., Bornstein, B.H., McGorty, E.K., & Penrod, S.

(2008). Forgetting the once-seen face: Estimating the strength of

an eyewitness’s memory representation. Journal of Experimental

Psychology: Applied, 14, 139–150.

Greathouse, S.M., & Kovera, M.B. (2009). Instruction bias and

lineup presentation moderate the effects of administrator

knowledge on eyewitness identification. Law and Human Beha-

vior, 33, 70–82.

Innocence Project (2010). Retrieved August 16, 2010, from http://

www.innocenceproject.org/

Keast, A., Brewer, N., & Wells, G.L. (2007). Children’s metacogni-

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Experimental Child Psychology, 97, 286–314.

Lindsay, R.C.L., Semmler, C., Weber, N., Brewer, N., &

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distance: Why there should not be a 15 m ‘‘rule.’’ Law and Human

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Lindsay, R.C.L., & Wells, G.L. (1985). Improving eyewitness

identifications from lineups: Simultaneous versus sequential

lineup presentation. Journal of Applied Psychology, 70, 556–564.

Meissner, C.A., & Brigham, J.C. (2001). Thirty years of investigating

the own-race bias in memory for faces: A meta-analytic review.

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Palmer, M.A., Brewer, N., McKinnon, A.C., & Weber, N. (2010).

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fication decisions. Acta Psychologica, 133, 137–145.

Sauer, J.D., Brewer, N., & Weber, N. (2008). Multiple confidence esti-

mates as indices of eyewitness memory. Journal of Experimental

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Eyewitness Identification 27

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Current Issues and Advances inMisinformation Research

Steven J. Frenda, Rebecca M. Nichols, and Elizabeth F. LoftusUniversity of California, Irvine

AbstractEyewitnesses are often called upon to report information about what they have seen. A wealth of research from the past centuryhas demonstrated, however, that eyewitness memory is malleable and vulnerable to distorting influences, including the effects ofmisinformation. In this article, we review recent developments in research related to the misinformation effect, includingindividual differences in susceptibility, neuroimaging approaches, and protective interview procedures that may better elicitaccurate event details. We conclude with a section on related false memory research.

Keywordseyewitness, memory, law, misinformation

Twenty-five people died when a Metrolink commuter train

collided with a Union Pacific freight train near Los Angeles

in September of 2008 (Steinhauer, 2008). With millions of

dollars in lawsuit payouts at stake, federal accident authorities

began an investigation of the deadly crash and had to decide a

key issue: Did the conductor pass legally through a green light,

as four eyewitnesses maintained? Or did he sail through a red

light, distracted by sending and receiving text messages? The

conductor died in the crash, so he could not be asked. If he were

at fault, the railroad company that was responsible for hiring

and supervising him would be liable. If the signal malfunc-

tioned, another company would be on the hook. After an exten-

sive investigation, the authorities decided the eyewitnesses

were wrong. The signal was red, and the engineer’s text messa-

ging was a major contributor to the accident. Is it possible that

four eyewitnesses—including a conductor, a security guard,

and two railroad enthusiasts—were all mistaken about such a

crucial detail? The answer is yes. Eyewitnesses make mistakes,

multiple eyewitnesses can all be wrong, and their erroneous

testimony can have enormous consequences.

How is it possible that so many witnesses could all be so

wrong? Eyewitnesses are called upon not only to remember

details of events but also to describe what people look like and

to decide how confident they are in the accuracy of their mem-

ories. They are often asked to remember things they saw in

extremely stressful circumstances, sometimes months or even

years after the fact. They are frequently bombarded with infor-

mation following the event they witnessed, such as other wit-

nesses’ reports, investigator feedback, leading questions, and

pressures to be both accurate and helpful. In the face of these

challenges, eyewitnesses misremember. In a recent discussion

of the distorting effect witnesses have on the memory of other

witnesses, Wright, Memon, Skagerberg, and Gabbert (2009)

proposed three accounts of why eyewitnesses come to report

incorrect information. First, a witness’s report may be altered

due to normative social influence. That is, a witness may decide

that the cost of disagreeing with law enforcement—or with

other witnesses—is too high, and so he adjusts his report

accordingly. A second possibility is that through informational

social influence processes, a witness comes to endorse a ver-

sion of events that is different from what he remembers because

he believes it to be truer or more accurate than his own mem-

ory. Finally, a witness’s memory can become distorted, some-

times as the result of being exposed to incorrect or misleading

information. This third possibility, known as the misinforma-

tion effect, is the focus of the current review. Advances in mis-

information research concerning individual differences,

neurophysiological correlates, cognitive interviewing, and

related research paradigms are reviewed.

What Is the Misinformation Effect?

In the wake of more than 30 years of research, an ever-growing

literature continues to demonstrate the distorting effects of mis-

leading postevent information on memory for words, faces, and

Corresponding Author:

Elizabeth Loftus, Department of Psychology & Social Behavior, University of

California, Irvine, CA 92697

E-mail: eloftus@uci.edu

Current Directions in PsychologicalScience20(1) 20-23ª The Author(s) 2011Reprints and permission:sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navDOI: 10.1177/0963721410396620http://cdps.sagepub.com

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details of witnessed events (see Loftus, 2005, for a review of

the misinformation effect). In a typical misinformation experi-

ment, research subjects are shown materials (e.g., photographs)

and are then exposed to deliberately misleading information

about what they saw. In a final testing phase, many subjects

will inadvertently incorporate elements from the misleading

information into their memory for the original source material.

For example, Stark, Okado, and Loftus (2010) showed subjects

a series of photographs that depicted a man stealing a woman’s

wallet and hiding it in his jacket pocket. Later, subjects heard

recorded narratives describing the slides. Embedded in the nar-

ratives were several pieces of misleading information (e.g.,

‘‘Then the man hid the wallet in his pants pocket’’). Finally,

subjects were asked questions about details from the photo-

graphs, such as ‘‘Where did the thief hide the woman’s wal-

let?’’ A substantial number of those subjects not only

reported that the thief hid the wallet in his pants pocket but they

also reported that they remembered that information from the

photographs, not the narratives.

Who Is Vulnerable?

Nobody is immune to the distorting effects of misinformation.

Building on the adult literature, misinformation effects have

been obtained in myriad subject samples, including infants

(Rovee-Collier, Borza, Adler, & Boller, 1993), and even ani-

mals (e.g., Schwartz, Meissner, Hoffman, Evans, & Frazier,

2004). Nonetheless, there is evidence that certain types of peo-

ple are especially vulnerable to misinformation effects. For

instance, very young children and the elderly are more suscep-

tible to misinformation than adolescents and adults (see Davis

& Loftus, 2005). Also especially vulnerable are subjects who

report lapses in memory and attention (Wright & Livingston-

Raper, 2002). What do these findings tell us about the underly-

ing mechanisms driving the misinformation effect? One argu-

ment is that a poverty of cognitive resources necessitates an

increased reliance on external cues to reconstruct memories

of events. As Loftus (2005) points out, misinformation effects

are easier to obtain when subjects’ attentional resources are

limited. Similarly, people who perceive themselves to be for-

getful and who experience memory lapses may be less able

(or willing) to depend on their own memories as the sole source

of information as they mentally reconstruct an event.

Recently, two major studies containing more than 400 sub-

jects have explored cognitive ability and personality factors as

predictors of susceptibility to misinformation. In each study,

subjects viewed slides of two crimes and later read narratives

of the crimes that contained misinformation. Those subjects

who had higher intelligence scores, greater perceptual abilities,

greater working memory capacities, and greater performance

on face recognition tasks tended to resist misinformation and

produce fewer false memories (Zhu et al., 2010a). Certain

personality characteristics were also shown to be associated

with false memory formation, particularly in individuals with

lesser cognitive ability. Specifically, individuals low in fear

of negative evaluation and harm avoidance, and those high in

cooperativeness, reward dependence, and self-directedness

were associated with an increased vulnerability to misinforma-

tion effects (Zhu et al., 2010b). In other words, it seems that

personality variables may be helpful in understanding the pro-

cesses underlying memory distortion following exposure to

misinformation but less so in individuals with superior cogni-

tive ability. These interactions may help explain why individ-

ual difference results have not always replicated in false

memory research.

Misinformation and Neuroimaging

Relatively new but increasingly popular tools for exploring the

effects of postevent information on memory include a set of

highly specialized neuroscientific methods which include func-

tional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI. In a typical

fMRI-based behavioral experiment, subjects undergo tradi-

tional experimental procedures in an MRI scanner, during

which functional images of oxygenated blood flow in the brain

are collected. The resulting images can be analyzed and inter-

preted as differential brain activation associated with particular

tasks. Functional MRI, therefore, is a useful and noninvasive

tool for examining the neurobiological correlates of behavior.

Scientists have begun to investigate brain activity associated

with the misinformation effect. In a recent study (Stark et al.,

2010), subjects were shown a series of photographs and later

listened to an auditory narrative describing them, which

included misleading information. Soon afterward, they were

placed into an MRI scanner and given a test of their memory

for the photographs. Functional neuroimaging data revealed

similar patterns of brain activity for true and false memories,

but the true memories (formed by visual information) showed

somewhat more activation in the visual cortex while the false

memories (derived from the auditory narrative) showed some-

what more activation in the auditory cortex. As the researchers

noted, these results are congruent with the sensory reactivation

hypothesis (Slotnick & Schacter, 2004, 2006), which in part

proposes that the same sensory regions activated in the brain

during encoding will be reactivated during retrieval. These

results suggest that there may be differing brain activation pat-

terns for true and false memories when they are encoded in dif-

ferent sensory modalities.

Research that involves neuroimaging and other neuroscien-

tific measurement techniques are promising for discoveries

about the effects of misinformation on memory: They can pro-

vide glimpses into how different neurological processes under-

lie true and false memories. At the present time, however, it

would be wise to err on the side of caution in the application

of these findings. Although some differences were found, the

patterns of brain activation associated with true and false mem-

ories in Stark et al.’s (2010) study were not reliably distinct,

and other small differences in brain activation (unrelated to the

sensory reactivation hypothesis) were not fully accounted for.

Furthermore, data from fMRI studies are often averaged both

within and across participants, which makes interpretation at

the individual level of analysis difficult. Although functional

Misinformation Research 21

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neuroimaging is elaborate and cutting edge, it has yet to pro-

vide a sure-fire way to confidently judge whether or not a par-

ticular person’s memory is accurate.

Protecting Against Misinformation Effects

Not surprisingly, some effort has been focused on ways to pro-

tect against the distorting effect of misinformation. One tech-

nique for improving the accuracy and completeness of an

eyewitness’s recollection is known as the cognitive interview,

a set of rules and guidelines for interviewing eyewitnesses (see

Wells, Memon, & Penrod, 2006, for a review). The CI recom-

mends, for example, the use of free recall, contextual cues, tem-

poral ordering of events, and recalling the event from a variety

of perspectives (such as from a perpetrator’s point of view).

Also, the CI recommends that investigators avoid suggestive

questioning, develop rapport with the witness, and discourage

witnesses from guessing. In one recent study, subjects viewed

an 8-minute film depicting a robbery (Memon, Zaragoza,

Clifford, & Kidd, 2009). Later, subjects were given either a

CI or a free-response control interview, followed by suggestive

questioning about events not depicted in the film. Results indi-

cated that, consistent with earlier findings, the CI produced

more correct details than did the free-response procedure.

One week after the interview procedure, subjects were given

a recognition test for items in the video, and subjects incorpo-

rated details from the suggestive questioning into their memory

for the event. Results showed that the CI deterred the effects of

suggestion, but only when it came before the suggestive inter-

view. Though the investigative process would ideally be free of

all suggestive influence, a properly implemented cognitive

interview may help protect the integrity of an eyewitness’s

memory.

Related Lines of Research

In addition to the classic misinformation paradigm, researchers

have developed other ways to demonstrate that even the

subtlest suggestions can produce astonishing false witness

reports. For instance, a handful of studies have emerged in

which subjects are simply asked if they have seen video footage

of well-known news events, when in fact no such video footage

exists. One study found that 40% of a British sample was will-

ing to report having seen nonexistent footage of a bus explod-

ing in the 2005 London terrorist attacks (Ost, Granhag, Udell,

& Hjelmsater, 2008). Of the subjects who claimed they saw the

footage, 35% described memories of details that they could not

have seen. Another study (Sjoden, Granhag, Ost, & Hjelmsater,

2009) found that 64% of a Swedish sample claimed to have

seen nonexistent video footage of an attack on the Swedish for-

eign minister, and 19% went on to describe details in the form

of written narratives. The ease with which these studies elicited

blatantly false memory reports is striking.

Research has also shown that suggestion can also shape

autobiographical memory. Beginning with Loftus and

Pickrell’s Lost in the Mall study (1995), a series of studies have

successfully used personalized suggestion (or other suggestive

techniques) to plant false memories of traumatic childhood

events (Porter, Yuille, & Lehman, 1999), receiving a painful

enema (Hart & Schooler, 2006), and even impossible events

such as meeting Bugs Bunny—a Warner Brothers charac-

ter—at Disneyland (Braun, Ellis, & Loftus, 2002). These lines

of research represent a broad area in their own right, with con-

troversies and applications that are beyond the scope of this

paper. However, they show that misleading postevent informa-

tion has implications beyond merely mistaking a green traffic

light for a red one or misremembering where a pickpocket hid

a woman’s wallet. If suggestion can cause us to remember

experiences that never occurred, what does this say about the

reliability of eyewitness evidence in general? If merely asking

people if they have seen events they could not possibly have

witnessed represents a strong enough suggestion to cause such

staggering errors, what are the implications for witnesses who

were present at a crime scene but never saw a perpetrator’s

face, only to hear it described later? Researchers continue to

investigate what conditions lead to memory distortion, which

types of people are most susceptible, and how best to prevent

the distorting effects of postevent information. Unfortunately,

in spite of recent scientific advances, many eyewitness errors

continue to go undetected and can have devastating

consequences.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared that they had no conflicts of interest with respect

to their authorship or the publication of this article.

Recommended Reading

Brainerd, C.J., & Reyna, V.F. (2005). The science of false memory.

New York: Oxford University Press. A book, over 500 pages long,

that describes nearly everything a reader would want to know

about false memories.

Loftus, E.F. (2005). (See References). Summarizes some of the key

studies that have contributed to more than three decades’ worth

of research on the misinformation effect.

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