Research on eyewitness identification often involves exposing participants to a simulated crime and later testing memory using a lineup. We conducted a systematic review showing that pre-event instructions, instructions given before event exposure, are rarely reported and those that are reported vary in the extent to which they warn participants about the nature of the event or tasks. At odds with the experience of actual witnesses, some studies use pre-event instructions explicitly warning participants of the upcoming crime and lineup task. Both the basic and applied literature provide reason to believe that pre-event instructions may affect eyewitness identification performance. In the current experiment, we tested the impact of pre-event instructions on lineup identification decisions and confidence. Participants received non-specific pre-event instructions (i.e., “watch this video”) or eyewitness pre-event instructions (i.e., “watch this crime video, you’ll complete a lineup later”) and completed a culprit-absent or -present lineup. We found no support for the hypothesis that participants who receive eyewitness pre-event instructions have higher discriminability than participants who receive non-specific pre-event instructions. Additionally, confidence-accuracy calibration was not significantly different between conditions. However, participants in the eyewitness condition were more likely to see the event as a crime and to make an identification than participants in the non-specific condition. Implications for conducting and interpreting eyewitness identification research and the basic research on instructions and attention are discussed.
In social psychology research, there are several kinds of stereotypical materials that can be used – faces, videos, lists of words, attributes. However, when it comes to behavioral sentences, there is a lack of pre-tested racial stimuli available in the literature. To fill the gap, this paper provides two lists of 154 short behavioral sentences, with stereotypicality (white to black) and valence (negative to positive) ratings. The first list was pre-tested with an American sample (Study 1), while the second list was pre-tested with a European Portuguese sample (Study 2). Importantly, this paper focuses on the broader meaning of black stereotypes’ and not just the narrower definition of the African American stereotype, whose differences are discussed. T-tests identified 73 and 118 stereotypical behavioral descriptions, for future use, respectively for the American and European Portuguese samples. Additional comparisons within and between samples are also provided. Full behavioral descriptions, along with pertinent statistical data, are available to the reader, as a useful working instrument for future research.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.