Eyewitness Testimony Analysis

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During the identification and prosecution of a suspect, eyewitnesses are the most important. Eyewitness testimony needs to be reliable as it can have serious implications to the perceived guilt or innocence of a defendant. Unfortunately, the reliability of eyewitness testimony is questionable because there is a high number of eyewitness misidentification. Rattner (1988) studied 205 cases and concluded that eyewitness misidentification was the factor most often associated with wrongful conviction (52%). Eyewitness testimony can be affected by many factors. A substantial literature demonstrates own group biases in eyewitness testimony. For example, the own-race bias, in which people are better at recognizing faces of their own race versus another …show more content…

The aim of the study is to examine own gender bias in eyewitness testimony by fully crossing gender of participant with gender of target in a simulated crime scene. The hypotheses that will be tested in this study include: a) female participants identify female target person more accurate, b) male participants identify male target person more accurate, and c) female and male participants identify male and female target equally …show more content…

The participants will be show a video from a convenience store in which a person is shown broke into the store at night. The person intends to steal the money from the cash register, but does not realize the owner is still there. Two people get into a fight, the owner fights back by punching and hitting the person, suddenly, the person pulls out a knife in the pocket and stabs the owner three times. After the stabbing, the perpetrator drops the knife and runs out of the store. Gender of the perpetrator will be varied such that, in the different version of the film, either a male or female stabs the owner. The whole video will last for about four minutes. Both actors of the perpetrator role will dress in the same way (black hair, brown hoodies, and black pant), use the same gestures, facial expression, and the same amount of stabs. The video looks like a recording made by a colour surveillance camera mounted on the

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