Amy Bradfield Douglass

Bates College · Department of Psychology

Informants are witnesses who often testify in exchange for an incentive (i.e. jailhouse informant, cooperating witness). Despite the widespread use of informants, little is known about the circumstances surrounding their use at trial. This study content-analyzed trials from 22 DNA exoneration cases involving 53 informants. Because these defendants...

Objective: Three studies examined the influence of a witness's identification speed on the identification decision of another witness. Hypotheses: Based on research documenting cowitness effects we expected cowitness speed to affect identification decisions from target-absent photospreads. Without prior research testing the effects of cowitness...

Informant testimony is a leading cause of wrongful convictions. The Supreme Court has recognized the questionable reliability of informant testimony but has generally held it admissible while emphasizing the existing safeguards built into the legal system. Psycholegal research has demonstrated the overwhelmingly persuasive nature of informant testi...

Objective: The Executive Committee of the American Psychology-Law Society (Division 41 of the American Psychological Association) appointed a subcommittee to update the influential 1998 scientific review paper on guidelines for eyewitness identification procedures. Method: This was a collaborative effort by six senior eyewitness researchers, who...

Objective: The Executive Committee of the American Psychology-Law Society (Division 41 of the American Psychological Association) appointed a subcommittee to update the influential 1998 scientific review paper on guidelines for eyewitness identification procedures. Method: This was a collaborative effort by six senior eyewitness researchers, who al...

Eyewitness memory can be distorted by simple comments received after an identification decision is made. When these comments suggest that the identification decision was correct, they inflate witnesses’ recollections of how confident they were, how good their view was, and other testimony-relevant judgments. This post-identification feedback effect...

Eyewitnesses’ retrospective reports of certainty, view, attention, and other judgments constitute central variables used by courts to assess the credibility of eyewitness identification evidence. Recently, important state Supreme Court decisions (e.g., New Jersey v. Henderson, 2011; Oregon v. Lawson, 2012) have relied on psychological research rega...

PurposeIn some cases of wrongful convictions, demeanour seen as inappropriate can trigger suspicions of guilt. Two experiments systematically manipulated the demeanour of criminal suspects in interrogations to test its impact on guilt ratings. Methods In Experiment 1 (N = 60), participants saw a videotaped interrogation in which the suspect display...

Despite myriad possible differences in perspectives brought to an investigative interview by eyewitnesses and interviewers, little is known about how such differences might affect eyewitness memory reports or interviewer behavior. Two experiments tested the impact of such differences in a dynamic interaction paradigm in which participants served as...

Purpose. Confidence inflation in eyewitnesses obscures a useful cue to identification accuracy and affects evaluations of eyewitnesses (e.g., Bradfield & McQuiston, 2004; Jones, Williams, & Brewer, 2008). We examine whether sensitivity to confidence inflation evidence is enhanced by seeing a videotape of the identification procedure. Methods. Parti...

We examined whether post-identification feedback and suspicion affect accurate eyewitnesses. Participants viewed a video event and then made a lineup decision from a target-present photo lineup. Regardless of accuracy, the experimenter either, informed participants that they made a correct lineup decision or gave no information regarding their line...

• Over the last several decades over 250 citizens convicted of major felonies were found innocent and were exonerated. Today, thanks to the work of psychologists and other criminal justice researchers, the psychological foundations that underlie conviction of the innocent are becoming clear. There is real hope that these findings can lead to positi...

Purpose. Information provided to eyewitnesses suggesting that their identification was correct (i.e., post-identification feedback) distorts witnesses' memory reports. More pronounced effects of feedback have been detected for subjective than for objective judgments. We investigated two variables that might explain this finding: response format and...

This Amicus Curiae brief is submitted on behalf of 13 current and former professors of psychology who are experts on memory and eyewitness identification. Amici teach, research and write about memory as evidence as applied by the state and federal courts of the United States. As experts on memory and eyewitness identification, they have a stro...

Two experiments were conducted to test whether post-identification feedback affects evaluations of eyewitnesses. In Experiment 1 (N = 156), evaluators viewed eyewitness testimony. They evaluated witnesses who received confirming post-identification feedback as more accurate and more confident, among other judgments, compared with witnesses who rece...

Purpose. Previous research on the reliability of eyewitnesses' facial composites suggests that some scepticism is warranted when evaluating their accuracy. The current research examines the degree to which mock jurors evaluate facial composite images as a source of incriminating or exonerating evidence against a defendant, particularly when they ar...

After viewing or hearing a recorded simulated crime, participants were asked to identify the offender's voice from a target-absent audio lineup. After making their voice identification, some participants were either given confirming feedback or no feedback. The feedback manipulation in experiment 1 led to higher ratings of participants' identificat...

Purpose. The nascent field of alibi evaluation research has produced interesting and inconsistent findings. We focus on a heretofore unexamined variable that may play a critical role in alibi evaluation: context. Specifically, two experiments tested the hypothesis that the same alibi can be evaluated differently when presented in the context of a p...

Two experiments tested whether the sequential photospread procedure would protect eyewitnesses against memory distortion from post-identification feedback. In Experiment 1, participants (N = 245) watched a videotaped event and then viewed a sequential or simultaneous target-absent photospread. After their identification, participants were randomly...

Feedback administered to eyewitnesses after they make a line-up identification dramatically distorts a wide range of retrospective judgements (e.g. G. L. Wells & A. L. Bradfield, 1998 Journal of Applied Psychology, 83(3), 360–376.). This paper presents a meta-analysis of extant research on post-identification feedback, including 20 experimental tes...

In Experiment 1, photospread administrators (PAs, N = 50) showed a target-absent photospread to a confederate eyewitness (CW), who was randomly assigned to identify one photo with either high or low confidence. PAs subsequently administered the same target-absent photospread to participant eyewitnesses (PWs, N = 50), all of whom had viewed a live s...

The hindsight bias (e.g., Fischhoff, 1975) illustrates that outcome information can make people believe that they would have (or did) predict an outcome that they would not (or did not) actually predict. In two experiments, participants (N = 226) made a prediction immediately before receiving outcome information. Therefore, participants could not d...

Two studies investigated perceptions of eyewitness confidence inflation: increases in a witness's confidence between the time of the identification and the trial. Experiment 1 (N = 90) demonstrated that, for White participants, assessments of the strength of the defense case, the eyewitness's view, and participants' confidence in the eyewitness's a...

The authors investigated eyewitnesses' retrospective certainty (see G. L. Wells & A. L. Bradfield, 1999). The authors hypothesized that extemal influence from the lineup administrator would damage the certainty-accuracy relation by inflating the retrospective certainty of inaccurate eyewitnesses more than that of accurate eyewitnesses (N = 245). Tw...

The U.S. Supreme Court has outlined five criteria on which evaluations of eyewitness identifications should be based (certainty, view, attention, description, and time; Neil v. Biggers, 1972). We postulated that certainty plays a qualitatively different role from the four other Biggers criteria in evaluations of eyewitness identification testimony....

Lineups and photospreads can be biased against a criminal suspect and there is a need to measure this bias. The mock witness method has been accepted by eyewitness scientists since the 1970s as the paradigm for generating the data on which various metrics of bias are based. We note the reasons that structural lineup bias can lead to mistaken identi...

Giving eyewitnesses confirming feedback after they make a lineup identification (e.g., “Good. You identified the actual suspect.”) inflates not only their recollections of how confident they were at the time of the identification, but also other testimony-relevant judgments, such as how good their view was, how much attention they paid during witne...

A criminal trial involves people who take the stand and recount events that they witnessed firsthand. The purpose of their testimony is to aid the triers of fact in making determinations about a critical past event, which in turn, allows the judge and/or jury to render a verdict based on these facts. Almost all witness testimony takes the form of a...

People viewed a security video and tried to identify the gunman from a photospread. The actual gunman was not in the photospread and all eyewitnesses made false identifications ( n = 352). Following the identification, witnesses were given confirming feedback ("Good, you identified the actual suspect"), disconfirming feedback ("Actually, the suspec...

People viewed a security video and tried to identify the gunman from a photospread. The actual gunman was not in the photospread and all eyewitnesses made false identifications (n = 352). Following the identification, witnesses were given confirming feedback ("Good, you identified the actual suspect"), disconfirming feedback ("Actually, the suspect...