Is eyewitness testimony really as unreliable as popularly thought? This article takes a new perspective that eyewitness memory is reliable under certain controllable conditions. You may have come across or read a couple of legal cases involving eyewitness testimony, like the popular case of Broadwater v Sebold. Sebold was a victim of sexual assault, and during investigation, she wrongly identified Broadwater as the perpetrator, albeit being confident that she identified the correct person. What were the most salient observations you made? Perhaps, you had observed how eyewitness memory can fail. Yes – this is the case for the most part. Memory itself is highly malleable and it is no surprise that high stake situations distort it further. Unsurprisingly, this is what most research and popular press articles you read on eyewitness accounts makes you believe.
In 1978, Elizabeth Loftus, a renowned eyewitness memory researcher introduced the idea that memory is malleable. Loftus found that people can actually be made to believe an event that did not happen or believe that event happened in a different way. Her experiments found that participants who received misleading postevent information incorrectly believed that they saw a stop sign instead of a yield sign. She applied this finding to eyewitness memory and concluded that eyewitnesses are susceptible to misinformation that distorts their memory of events – of course, human memory is not a perfect recording device. Many researchers have made similar observations that also support this idea, and many are contending that eyewitness testimony should not be used in the legal system.
Researchers, John Wixted, Laura Mickes, and Ronald Fisher are now challenging this age-old argument that eyewitness memory is unreliable. According to them, “as is also true of other kinds of scientifically validated forensic evidence, eyewitness memory is reliable when it is not contaminated and when proper testing procedures are used.” The way eyewitness evidence is collected and handled by the legal system is significantly more consequential to its reliability than the mere imperfection of human memory. From Loftus’ experiments, we may agree that individuals distort their memories mainly because of external suggestions and misleading misinformation. What if no implicit or explicit misleading information is provided to eyewitnesses by letting them give accounts of an event without any cues, would that make their memory more reliable? To a very large extent, yes.
When we take a closer look at Wixted and colleagues’ argument for the reliability of eyewitness memory, one thing we can observe is that they shift our attention from estimator variables to systemic variables. Estimator variables are the factors that the legal system cannot directly control – an example is the distance between a witness and the offender during the crime. Eyewitness memory has been considered unreliable mainly due to these estimator variables. For example, an eyewitness could inaccurately estimate the distance between them and the offender. Systemic variables on the other hand are factors that the legal system can directly control. For example, the procedures that go one during investigative processes directly fall under the control of the legal system, like lineup procedures and the instructions that they give eyewitnesses. Wixted and colleagues argue that if these systemic variables are adequately controlled, then eyewitness testimony is reliable; hence “eyewitness memory is reliable if testing conditions are uncontaminated and if proper procedures are followed in testing eyewitness memory.” Unfortunately, what researchers focus on more are the estimator variables, and the implication is that since it is not something that we can control, we could just feel that there is no solution and continue upholding the belief that eyewitness memory is inherently unreliable. Although there are some practical constraints to controlling systemic variables, the solution remains to carefully carefully control all possible systemic factors.
Wixted and colleagues outlined some criteria that must be met in order to ensure that eyewitness memory is reliable. They recommend that lineup administrators and investigators should ensure that witnesses are not exposed to contaminating information like making an individual in the lineup distinctive. Secondly, they should ensure that witnesses are not misled into believing or providing favourable information. They also suggest that investigators should be aware and closely monitor witnesses’ confidence level. Additionally, investigators should ensure that the witnesses’ memories are being probed for the first time, since initial confidence often most reliably predicts memory accuracy. It turns out, after all, that eyewitness memory may be reliable as we are quick to think – if we take proactive measures to ensure proper guidelines in the collection and handling of eyewitness evidence.