Validity of the mockwitness paradigm: testing the assumptions.

Full Abstract

Mockwitness identifications are used to provide a quantitative measure of lineup fairness. Some theoretical and practical assumptions of this paradigm have not been studied in terms of mockwitnesses' decision processes and procedural variation (e.g., instructions, lineup presentation method), and the current experiment was conducted to empirically evaluate these assumptions. Four hundred and eighty mockwitnesses were given physical information about a culprit, received 1 of 4 variations of lineup instructions, and were asked to identify the culprit from either a fair or unfair sequential lineup containing 1 of 2 targets. Lineup bias estimates varied as a result of lineup fairness and the target presented. Mockwitnesses generally reported that the target's physical description was their main source of identifying information. Our findings support the use of mockwitness identifications as a useful technique for sequential lineup evaluation, but only for mockwitnesses who selected only 1 lineup member. Recommendations for the use of this evaluation procedure are discussed.

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Author information

Author/s: McQuiston, Dawn E (DE); Malpass, Roy S (RS);

Affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Texas at El Paso, 79968, USA.

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article; Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.; Validation Studies

Journal: Law and human behavior (Law Hum Behav), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2002-Aug; vol 26 (issue 4) : pp 439-53

Dates: Created 2002/08/16; Completed 2002/09/18; Revised 2006/11/15;

PMID: 12182532, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 11/6/2008)

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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