There is increasing evidence that fake eyewitness identification is the primary cause of the conviction of innocent people. In 1996, the American Psychology/Law Society and Division 41 of the American Psychological Association appointed a subcommittee to review scientific evidence and make recommendations regarding the best procedures for constructing and conducting lineups and photospreads. Three important themes from the scientific literature relevant to lineup methods were identified and reviewed, namely relative-judgment processes, the lineups-as-experiments analogy, and confidence malleability. Recommendations are made that double-blind lineup testing should be used, that eyewitnesses should be forewarned that the culprit might not be present, that distmctors should be selected based on the eyewitness's verbal description of the perpetrator, and that confidence should be assessed and recorded at the time of identification. The potential costs and benefits of these recommendations are discussed.

An account of the own-race bias and the contact hypothesis based on a "face space" model of face recognition. In T. Valentine (Ed.), Cognitive and computational aspects of face recognition: Explorations in face space (pp. 64 -94). London, England: Routledge.

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In the past 30 years researchers have examined the impact of heightened stress on the fidelity of eyewitness memory. Meta-analyses were conducted on 27 independent tests of the effects of heightened stress on eyewitness identification of the perpetrator or target person and separately on 36 tests of eyewitness recall of details associated with the crime. There was considerable support for the hypothesis that high levels of stress negatively impact both types of eyewitness memory. Meta-analytic Z-scores, whether unweighted or weighted by sample size, ranged from −5.40 to −6.44 (high stress condition-low stress condition). The overall effect sizes were −.31 for both proportion of correct identifications and accuracy of eyewitness recall. Effect sizes were notably larger for target-present than for target-absent lineups, for eyewitness identification studies than for face recognition studies and for eyewitness studies employing a staged crime than for eyewitness studies employing other means to induce stress.

A formal model of social influence is presented that integrates majority and minority influence processes within a single theoretical framework. The Social Influence Model (SIM) uses computer simulations to model the group influence process. SIM's performance is assessed by comparison with empirical findings from a metaanalysis of research on conformity, minority influence, and deviate rejection. The results indicate that influence is predominantly a function of the number of targets and sources of influence, both of which are incorporated into a nonlinear "growth" function that accurately predicts the amount of influence obtained in social influence studies. The consistency of the influence source was also an important predictor of influence; task type, group type, and response mode affected influence to a lesser degree.Researchers have examined social influence processes from a diverse array of perspectives. Within the small group domain, several general classes of influence have been examined. For purposes of this article, our use of the term social influence is limited to apply to studies commonly classified under the headings of conformity, minority influence, and deviate rejection. Asch's (1951) classic studies on conformity led to a vast body of research into the factors that will cause an individual to succumb to group pressure (Allen, 1965) as well as factors that will reduce conformity (Allen,, 1975). Conformity theory is concerned with the extent to which a simulated majority can influence a minority of one or more naive individuals to respond in a way that they would not respond ordinarily.

A mock-jury study was conducted to examine juror sensitivity to eyewitness identification evidence. Subjects were 129 eligible and experienced jurors from Dane County, Wisconsin, who viewed a vi[deotaped trial that involved an eyewitness identification. Ten factors associated with the crime and the identification (e.g., disguise of the perpetrator, retention interval, confidence of the witness) were manipulated. The results of this mock-jury study were combined with those of a previous study using tile same experimental stimuli and procedures, but using undergraduates as subjects. This analysis showed that the confidence of the eyewitness was the most powerful predictor of verdicts (p < .05) and that differences between undergraduates and eligible jurors in their sensitivity to eyewitness evidence were negligible.

The lay-person's knowledge of the factors that influence eyewitness memory was examined by evaluating the manner in which mock jurors integrated eyewitness evidence to draw inferences about defendant culpability and the likelihood that an identification was correct. Three hundred and twenty-one undergraduates viewed a videotaped trial within which ten witness and identification factors were manipulated between trials. Manipulation checks showed that subjects demonstrated superior memory for the evidence and the manipulated variables had their intended impact on appropriate rating scales. However, only one variable, witness confidence, had reliable effects on subjects' perceptions of culpability, on the perceived likelihood that the identification was correct, and on several other relevant dependent variables. Eight variables that have been shown to affect identification accuracy in the empirical literature had trivial effects on mock jurors' inferences. It was concluded that lay-people are insensitive to the factors that influence eyewitness memory.