Laura Smalarz

• Ph.D.
• Professor (Associate) at Arizona State University

An overlooked observation in the literature on double-blind lineups is that double-blind lineup administrators sometimes engage in behaviors that could influence eyewitnesses. We tested whether such administrator behaviors influence eyewitnesses’ identification decisions and confidence when eyewitnesses are explicitly instructed that the administra...

Objectives: We assessed recent policy recommendations to collect eyewitnesses' confidence statements in witnesses' own words as opposed to numerically. We conducted an experiment to test whether eyewitnesses' free-report verbal confidence statements are as diagnostic of eyewitness accuracy as their numeric confidence statements and whether the dia...

We tested whether multiple doses of feedback have cumulative effects on eyewitness-identification confidence. In Experiment 1, participants made mistaken identifications and received or did not receive three forms of confirming feedback: (1) co-witness feedback; (2) vague feedback from the experimenter (“You’ve been a good witness”); and (3) infere...

Over the course of a criminal investigation, eyewitnesses are sometimes shown multiple lineups in an attempt to identify the culprit, yet little research has examined eyewitness identification performance from multiple lineups. In two experiments, we examined eyewitness identification accuracy among witnesses who made an inaccurate identification f...

Objective: Despite the risks inherent to custodial police interrogation, criminal suspects may waive their Miranda rights and submit to police questioning in fear that exercising their rights or remaining silent will make them appear guilty. We tested whether such a Miranda penalty exists. Hypotheses: We predicted that people would perceive suspect...

Biases in favor of culturally prevalent social ingroups are ubiquitous, but random assignment to arbitrary experimentally created social groups is also sufficient to create ingroup biases (i.e., the minimal group effect; MGE). The extent to which ingroup bias arises from specific social contexts versus more general psychological tendencies remains...

Field data from lineups involving real eyewitnesses in criminal investigations reveal that eyewitnesses make errors at alarming rates—in nearly one out of every four lineups. Police investigators can prevent eyewitness misidentifications of innocent suspects by using research-informed procedures to collect eyewitness-identification evidence. Nine s...

The legal system relies heavily on eyewitness evidence to identify and prosecute criminal perpetrators, but wrongful convictions resulting from eyewitness misidentification have led many to conclude that eyewitness memory is unreliable. Advances in eyewitness identification research have produced a more nuanced understanding of eyewitness reliabili...

Objective: Black people are disproportionately targeted and disadvantaged in the criminal legal system. We tested whether Black exonerees are similarly disadvantaged by the stigma of wrongful conviction. Hypotheses: In Experiment 1, we predicted that the stigma of wrongful conviction would be greater for Black than White exonerees. After finding th...

Objective: Despite documented racial disparities in all facets of the criminal justice system, recent laboratory attempts to investigate racial bias in legal settings have produced null effects or racial-bias reversals. These counterintuitive findings may be an artifact of laboratory participants' attempts to appear unprejudiced in response to soc...

Objective: Recently, experimental work on racial bias in legal settings has diverged from real-world field data demonstrating racial disparities, instead often producing null or potential overcorrection effects favoring Black individuals over White individuals. We explored the role of social desirability in these counterintuitive effects and tested...

General Audience Summary There is consensus among psychological scientists that fair lineups lead to a better trade-off between guilty-suspect identifications and innocent-suspect identifications than do biased lineups. Yet, debate over the mechanism that leads to this fair-lineup advantage abounds. On the one hand, some propose that fair lineups i...

Two provocative claims about eyewitness confidence have recently been advanced in the eyewitness-identification literature: (a) suspect identifications made with high confidence are highly accurate and (b) high-confidence suspect-identification accuracy is unaffected by variations in memory strength. Several recent publications have reiterated thes...

General Audience Summary Eyewitness-identification testimony from highly confident, yet mistaken eyewitnesses has contributed to hundreds of wrongful convictions in the United States (www.innocenceproject.org, 2020). But this fact is somewhat puzzling because controlled laboratory studies show that eyewitnesses rarely make mistaken identifications...

Objective: Two provocative claims about eyewitness confidence have recently been advanced in the eyewitness-identification literature: (1) suspect identifications made with high confidence are highly accurate and (2) high-confidence suspect-identification accuracy is unaffected by variations in memory strength. We argue that several recent publicat...

Eyewitnesses are sometimes asked to participate in multiple lineup procedures over the course of a criminal investigation, yet little is known about how evaluators perceive eyewitnesses who responded to an earlier identification procedure. In the current research, evaluators (N = 175) read a partial trial transcript in which the eyewitness testifie...

This research tested whether the perception of threat during a police interrogation mobilizes suspects to cope with interrogation demands and bolsters their resistance to self-incrimination pressures. Experimental procedures led university undergraduates (N = 296) to engage in misconduct or not, thereby making them guilty or innocent. An experiment...

This article presents an expected cost model for evaluating and comparing the performance of eyewitness identification procedures. The model estimates the expected cost of an identification procedure in order to quantify how well the procedure helps the police achieve the investigation goal of identifying and incriminating the culprit. We first app...

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...

General Audience Summary A primary concern in eyewitness identification research is determining which of two lineup procedures leads to better applied outcomes. The difficulty in making this determination is that the procedure that leads to more culprit identifications (a benefit) also normally leads to more innocent-suspect identifications (a cost...

This research examined whether criminal stereotypes—i.e., beliefs about the typical characteristics of crime perpetrators—influence mock jurors’ judgments of guilt in cases involving confession evidence. Mock jurors (N = 450) read a trial transcript that manipulated whether a defendant’s ethnicity was stereotypic or counterstereotypic of a crime, a...

Nothing is more fundamental to Signal Detection Theory (SDT) than the notion that memory performance decreases as lures become increasingly similar to target items. Yet, Colloff, Wade, and Strange (2016) claimed that the use of high-similarity fillers (lineup lures) increased memory performance relative to low-similarity fillers. We use their data...

In 1966, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a controversial ruling in Miranda v. Arizona, which required police to inform suspects, prior to custodial interrogation, of their constitutional rights to silence and to counsel. In commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Miranda, we present a psychological analysis of the Court’s ruling. We show how th...

We conducted two experiments to test whether police interrogation elicits a biphasic process of resistance from suspects. According to this process, the initial threat of police interrogation mobilizes suspects to resist interrogative influence in a manner akin to a fight or flight response, but suspects’ protracted self-regulation of their behavio...

This research provided the first empirical test of the hypothesis that stereotypes bias evaluations of forensic evidence. A pilot study (N = 107) assessed the content and consensus of 20 criminal stereotypes by identifying perpetrator characteristics (e.g., sex, race, age, religion) that are stereotypically associated with specific crimes. In the m...

The U.S. Supreme Court has not reexamined the test for admission of eyewitness identifications that are the product of suggestive procedures in over 35 years (Manson v. Brathwaite, 432 U.S. 98, 1977). Since then, there have been over 218 DNA-based exonerations of individuals who were mistakenly identified, and an extensive and rich scientific liter...

The police lineup is a common tool for eyewitness identifications of suspects in criminal cases. Forensic DNA testing of people convicted by eyewitness identification evidence and field studies of police lineups, however, have revealed that mistaken identification from lineups is not uncommon. Controlled laboratory experiments have isolated numerou...

Our previous article (Wells et al., 2015a. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition) showed how ROC analysis of lineups does not measure underlying discriminability or control for response bias. Wixted and Mickes (2015. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition) concede these points. Hence, in this article we focus more on how...

Some researchers have been arguing that eyewitness identification data from lineups should be analyzed using Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) analysis because it purportedly measures underlying discriminability. But ROC analysis, which was designed for 2 × 2 tasks, does not fit the 3 × 2 structure of lineups. Accordingly, ROC proponents forc...

Mistaken identification testimony by highly confident eyewitnesses has been involved in approximately 72% of the cases in which innocent people have been convicted and later exonerated by DNA testing. Lab studies of eyewitness identification, however, show that mistaken eyewitnesses are usually not highly confident and that there is a useful confid...

We provide a novel Bayesian treatment of the eyewitness identification problem as it relates to various system variables, such as instruction effects, lineup presentation format, lineup-filler similarity, lineup administrator influence, and show-ups versus lineups. We describe why eyewitness identification is a natural Bayesian problem and how nume...

This research examined whether confirming postidentification feedback following a mistaken identification impairs eyewitness memory for the original culprit. We also examined whether the degree of similarity between a mistakenly identified individual and the actual culprit plays a role in memory impairment. Participant-witnesses (N = 145) made mist...

Giving confirming feedback to mistaken eyewitnesses has robust distorting effects on their retrospective judgments (e.g., how certain they were, their view, etc.). Does feedback harm evaluators' abilities to discriminate between accurate and mistaken identification testimony? Participant-witnesses to a simulated crime made accurate or mistaken iden...

Suspects have a preexisting vulnerability to make short-sighted confession decisions, giving disproportionate weight to proximal, rather than distal, consequences. The findings of the current research provided evidence that this preexisting vulnerability is exacerbated by factors that are associated with the immediate interrogation situation. In Ex...

An increasingly strong case can be made for the argument that mistaken-eyewitness identification is the primary cause of the conviction of the innocent in the United States. The strongest single body of evidence in support of this proposition is the collection of cases in which forensic DNA testing was used to exonerate people who had been convicte...

In the American legal system, one of the safeguards against wrongful convictions on the basis of mistaken eyewitness identification is the right of the defense to file motions to suppress suggestive eyewitness identifications. These pretrial motions to suppress eyewitness identification evidence are filed routinely, and yet they almost never succee...

The perpetual foreigner stereotype posits that members of ethnic minorities will always be seen as the "other" in the White Anglo-Saxon dominant society of the United States (Devos & Banaji, 2005), which may have negative implications for them. The goal of the present research was to determine whether awareness of this perpetual foreigner stereotyp...