Eyewitnesses Memory. "Good, you identified the suspect"

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Eyewitness Memory
In “Good, You Identified the Suspect: Feedback to Eyewitnesses Distorts their Reports of the Witnessing Experience,” researchers Wells and Bradfield explored how manipulating feedback to eyewitnesses by providing them with confirming feedback, disconfirming feedback or no feedback at all, affects their reports. Wells and Bradfield stated that falsely identifying a person in a line-up or photo-spread is the major cause of wrongful convictions (360), hence the need for their research. Besides, they indicate that the confidence of an eyewitness affects the quality of their testimony. A more confident eyewitness is more believable even when other factors surrounding the testimony are questionable. Such factors include the opportunity that the eye witness had to view the suspect, the attention paid at that time, the amount of time between witnessing the crime and identifying the suspect, the accuracy of the suspect’s description of a suspect, and the eyewitness’s certainty of their identification. Other researchers have focused mostly on the confidence of the eyewitness as the main measure of the quality of identification testimony. However, Wells and Bradfield focus on other measures, with their main focus being on how the feedback provided to eyewitnesses about the accuracy of their identification affects eyewitnesses’ reports.
The researchers conducted two experiments to confirm their hypothesis. The first experiment revealed that feedback manipulation affected the eyewitnesses’ recall of issues surrounding the event in question. First, the results showed that eyewitnesses’ certainty of their identification was affected by feedback manipulation. Second, their recall of the event in question, as well as the qualities of their identification, were affected by the manipulation. The effects were especially large when eyewitnesses were provided with confirming feedback. As informed by Wells and Bradfield, they became more confident about the certainty of their identification testimony, their opportunity of view on the su...