The influence of courtroom questioning style on actual and perceived eyewitness confidence and accuracy

Abstract

Purpose. Little research has been conducted on the effects of courtroom examination/questioning styles on witness confidence and accuracy. Two studies were therefore conducted, one investigating the effects of examination style on witness confidence and accuracy, the other investigating observers/jurors perceptions of witness confidence and accuracy. Method. In Study 1, after observing a video event, 60 witnesses were individually interviewed about the event according to one of three conditions: (1) simple questioning style, (2) lawyerese questioning style (containing leading and suppositional phrases), and (3) lawyerese with negative feedback style. In study 2, 60 observers/ jurors observed a good and a poor witness under examination by one of the three questioning styles. Measures of the perceived fairness of the examination were also taken in study 2. Results. In the main, significant results were found only for question items classed as difficult to remember. The lawyerese style appeared to have an adverse affect on confidence‐accuracy relationships. Adding subtle negative feedback reduced the problem, but at the price of reduced overall accuracy. Observers (jurors) also seemed to be most affected by observing the negative feedback style; judging the witness overall to be less accurate. An unexpected result was that, regardless of questioning style, presenting the testimony of the least confident witness first appeared to spuriously boost confidence and thereby perceived accuracy, in that witness's testimony. No significant effects were found for perceived fairness. Conclusions. In general, these results lend some support to those who have asserted that the lawyerese style of questioning may be unwise.

High stakes lies: police and non-police accuracy in detecting deception

“…However, these studies used limited ranges of stimulus materials and within subjects designs, thus restricting both the potential for variance in the data, and the robustness of the results. This fits with other more general research on witness confidence and accuracy, which suggests that, with a wide range of stimuli that include easy or 'obvious' items which increase the variance, confidenceaccuracy relationships tend to be higher so that the more confident people are that they are correct, the more likely they are to actually be correct (Kebbell, Wagstaff & Covey 1996;Wheatcroft, Wagstaff, & Kebbell, 2004). Furthermore, participants were more confident when correctly identifying deceptive appealers than honest appealers, implying that deceptive appealers may be more 'obvious' to observers, than honest appealers.…”

The influence of lawyers' questions on witness accuracy, confidence, and reaction times and on mock jurors' interpretation of witness accuracy

“…1 The fi ndings from this study have shown, however, that this may not necessarily be the case. Nor may it be the case that jurors are aware of this fact.…”

In‐court versus out‐of‐court testimonies: Children's experiences and adults' assessments

“…In real life court cases, a whole host of factors might affect how a child witness is perceived and assessed. For example, factors such as distance between the child and the camera (Landström & Granhag, 2008), time delay between observation and assessments (Sherrod, 1985), style of questioning (Wheatcroft, Wagstaff, & Kebbell, 2004), and the age of the child (Tobey et al, 1995) may also affect jurors perception and assessments of a child witness.…”