Roy S. Malpass

The University of Texas at El Paso | UTEP · Department of Psychology

Failures in the development of diagnostic procedures for obtaining eyewitness identification evidence, in the administration of eyewitness identification procedures, and in the evaluation of eyewitness testimony by police, attorneys, jurors, and judges have been documented repeatedly over the last seventy-five years, with remarkably little effect (...

This paper is a response to the earlier paper by Lindsay, Mansour, Beaudry, Leach and Bertrand (2009). We argue that eyewitness research is an important public good and that high-quality in research and policy formulations offered to the public interest is required to maintain our standing of trust. We argue that even though sequential lineups have...

The claim that sequential lineups are superior to simultaneous lineups and that our knowledge of sequential lineups is sufficient to warrant their being required by law is reviewed for the validity of both strong and weak claims of sequential superiority, adherence to principles of research design, and the needs of public policy. We conclude, (1) t...

Transforming research findings into policy recommendations requires evaluative criteria beyond traditional academic review. Policy development involves entire literatures, and criteria for examining adequacy of the underlying research as a policy base are needed. At the level of the studies many are obvious: high quality studies, well reported and...

Field studies of eyewitness identification are richly confounded. Determining which confounds undermine interpretation is important. The blind administration confound in the Illinois study is said to undermine it's value for understanding the relative utility of simultaneous and sequential lineups. Most criticisms of the Illinois study focus on fil...

Many states and communities are rewriting their eyewitness identification policies. Some of these jurisdictions are excluding simultaneous lineups altogether, and others are allowing them if double-blind administration of sequential lineups is not possible. The Innocence Project advocates the latter and puts forward blind sequential-lineup administ...

Facial composite images are often used in the criminal investigation process to facilitate the search for and identification of someone who has committed a crime. Since the use of facial composite images is sometimes relied upon as an integral part of an investigation, it is important to ascertain information about the various decisions made and pr...

A considerable amount of empirical research has been conducted on ways to improve the eyewitness identification process, with emphasis on the use of lineups. Public policy changes are currently underway with respect to lineup procedures: Sequential lineups are being recommended to police as the best practice. This may be premature because the condi...

Computer technology has become an increasingly important tool for conducting eyewitness identifications. In the area of lineup identifications, computerized administration offers several advantages for researchers and law enforcement. PC_Eyewitness is designed specifically to administer lineups. To assess this new lineup technology, two studies wer...

A great deal of research has been aimed at identifying the factors that produce errors in eyewitness identification. However, most of this work has been conducted in laboratory environments using undergraduates and naive lay persons as research participants. Little information is available on what police officers do in the course of their identific...

Recent research has demonstrated that verbal overshadowing occurs when a witness is forced to provide details of the culprit that are not readily available, but the effect does not occur when the witness is warned to provide only the information they are absolutely sure of (Meissner et al., 2001). The present study attempts to replicate this effect...

Mockwitness identifications are used to provide a quantitative measure of lineup fairness. Some theoretical and practical assumptions of this paradigm have not been studied in terms of mockwitnesses' decision processes and procedural variation (e.g., instructions, lineup presentation method), and the current experiment was conducted to empirically...

A large percentage of people recently exonerated by DNA evidence were imprisoned on the basis of faulty eyewitness identification. Many of these cases involved victims and suspects of different races. Two studies examined the recognition of Hispanic and Black target faces by Hispanic participants under nonoptimal viewing conditions. When viewing ti...

Accusations of discriminatory treatment of minority persons in the criminal justice system create a need for policy and procedure development to create real and perceived equal treatment. A facial recognition deficit among law enforcement officers and witnesses for persons of another "race" contributes to unequal treatment of minority group members...

A large percentage of people recently exonerated by DNA evidence were imprisoned on the basis of faulty eyewitness identification. Many of these cases involved victims and suspects of different races. Two studies examined the recognition of Hispanic and Black target faces by Hispanic participants under nonoptimal viewing conditions. When viewing ti...

Accusations of discriminatory treatment of minority persons in the criminal justice system create a need for policy and procedure development to create real and perceived equal treatment. A facial recognition deficit among law enforcement officers and witnesses for persons of another “race” contributes to unequal treatment of minority group members...

The U.S. Department of Justice released the first national guide for collecting and preserving eyewitness evidence in October 1999. Scientific psychology played a large role in making a case for these procedural guidelines as well as in setting a scientific foundation for the guidelines, and eyewitness researchers directly participated in writing t...

The U.S. Department of Justice released the first national guide for collecting and preserving eyewitness evidence in October 1999. Scientific psychology played a large role in making a case for these procedural guidelines as well as in setting a scientific foundation for the guidelines, and eyewitness researchers directly participated in writing t...

S. Garven, J. M. Wood, R. S. Malpass, and J. S. Shaw (1998) found that the interviewing techniques used in the McMartin Preschool case can induce preschool children to make false allegations of wrong doing against a classroom visitor. In this study, 2 specific components of the McMartin interviews, reinforcement and cowitness information, were exam...

S. Garven, J. M. Wood, R. S. Malpass, and J. S. Shaw (1998) found that the interviewing techniques used in the McMartin Preschool case can induce preschool children to make false allegations of wrongdoing against a classroom visitor. In this study, 2 specific components of the McMartin interviews, reinforcement and cowitness information, were exami...

The fairness of eyewitness identification lineups is assessed through the use of a series of fairness measures. All the measures proposed to date are based on the lineup choices of ‘mock witnesses’. Mock witnesses are persons who have not previously seen the offender but who have been given information about him, usually a verbal description. In a...

The fairness of line-ups and photospreads is a traditional concern of research and policy development in the area of eyewitness identification. Quantification of fairness, the construction of fairness indices, and the development of evaluation procedures started in the 1970s and continues to this day. This paper reviews the historical development o...

There is increasing evidence that false eyewitness identification is the primary cause of the conviction of innocent people. In 1996, the American Psychology/Law Society and Division 41 of the American Psychological Association appointed a subcommittee to review scientific evidence and make recommendations regarding the best procedures for construc...

Child interviewing techniques derived from transcripts of the McMartin Preschool case were found to be substantially more effective than simple suggestive questions at inducing preschool children to make false allegations against a classroom visitor. Thirty-six children interviewed with McMartin techniques made 58% accusations, compared with 17% fo...

Individualism-collectivism emerges from the literature as a high-order concept, explaining cross-cultural differences over a wide range of situations, with collectivists more inclined than individualists to provide for others. The present study challenges this conceptualization. Not only the readiness to support others (input) but also the expectat...

This volume summarizes the state of the art of the existing literature on 11 central topics from the diverse areas of psychology that are relevant for a better understanding of eye- and earwitness identifications. The book is written for psychological experts, and in such a way as to make the scientific work accessible to others concerned with ma...

In criminal investigations, considerable weight is given to eyewitness identification evidence. In some cases, like assault and robbery, this evidence may be the only kind available. Over the last two decades, considerable research has been aimed at the factors that cause identification errors. However, virtually all of this work has involved under...

Across a wide range of disciplines and phenomena, a particular theoret ical approach is at the center of attempts to understand human behavior. This theoretical approach, roughly characterized as Subjective Expected Utility (SEU) theory, figures prominently in formal and mathematical theo ries of behavior, as well as in intuitive and implicit analy...

This article reviews the research on differential recognition for own-versus other-race faces. A meta-analysis of 14 samples revealed that the magnitude of the own-race bias is similar for both Black and White subjects, accounting for about 10o of the variance in recognition accuracy. There is a considerable consistency across studies, indicating t...

In this chapter we try to deal with some of the consequences of the framework outlined in Chapter 1 for design and analysis in cross-cultural comparative studies. Our choice of topics is to some extent arbitrary. The emphasis is on hypothesis testing rather than on exploratory research and the descriptive interpretation of striking phenomena which...

Many researchers have suggested that schematic processes and prototype formation are important in face recognition (Goldstein & Chance, 1974; Malpass, 1975). A prototype is thought of as the “best” exemplar of a set or category of objects. Among it’s properties is a high probability of being identified as a familiar entity in the context of the cat...

Failing to recognize someone or misidentifying someone can have important personal and social consequences. The perceiver may suffer feelings of embarrassment or stupidity. The target may feel insulted, stereotyped, or in extreme cases may be falsely identified as a criminal. If the perceiver and the target are of different ethnic groups, misidenti...

We examined the hypothesis that differential orienting strategies for own -and other-race faces are responsible for the superiority of own-race over other-race face recognition. White and black subjects viewed both white and blackfaces following inferential or superficial judgement or intentional learning instructions. Experimentally inducing a sup...

Two aspects of fairness in eyewitness identification lineups are discussed: the effective size of a lineup, and the degree of bias towards or away from the defendant. Procedures are proposed for measuring both aspects of lineup fairness and a range of hypothetical examples is given. An appendix discusses and explains procedural and computational de...

100 college student eyewitnesses of a staged vandalism received varying lineup instructions under conditions in which the offender was present or absent. Biased instructions implied that Ss were to choose someone, whereas unbiased instructions provided a "no choice" option. Ss viewed corporeal lineups on 1 of 3 evenings following the vandalism. A h...

72 witnesses (college students) of staged vandalism either subsequently viewed no lineup (NL) or viewed lineups in which the vandal was present (VP) or absent (VA). Ss were asked 5 mo later to view 5 simultaneously displayed lineup photographs. Half the Ss in each lineup condition group were asked whether the vandal's photograph was present and, if...

Investigated the attitudinal congeniality hypothesis (the assumption that people learn material congenial to their attitudes more easily than uncongenial material) in a 2 by 2 design: instruction set (learn vs judge) by essay bias (pro vs con), with attitude toward student activism as the focal ex post facto variable. 120 college students served as...

Investigated the attitudinal congeniality hypothesis (the assumption that people learn material congenial to their attitudes more easily than uncongenial material) in a 2 by 2 design: instruction set (learn vs judge) by essay bias (pro vs con), with attitude toward student activism as the focal ex post facto variable. 120 college students served as...

The importance of realism in eyewitness identification research is examined as the basis for both the credibility and utility of the information it provides. Without knowledge of how laboratory eyewitnesses behave differently from real eyewitnesses, the relevance and external validity of identification studies may be questioned. Factors differentia...

Responds to comments by C. S. Otterbein (1978) and D. A. Wagner and D. A. Davis (1978) on R. S. Malpass's (see record 1978-28493-001) article on the interrelation between theory and method in cross-cultural psychology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

Cross-cultural psychology is considered as a methodological strategy, as a means of evaluating hypotheses of unicultural origin with evidence of more panhuman relevance, and as a means of developing new theoretical accounts of psychological phenomena that profit from broad sampling of human populations and social situations. As a methodological str...

The task of persons trained for interaction in a new cultural environment is conceived of as a decision-making task where the trainee generates and evaluates alternative acts. Different structures for presenting training materials may foster development of internalized standards for generation and evaluation of alternative acts to different degrees...

Preferences for 92 values were measured in ten groups of Ss in two separate and geographically distinct settings in the United States. Groups consisted of black and white males and females of lower-and middle-class status. Factor analysis showed five shared value composites: (1) the good life, (2) pleasant working companions, (3) balance and adjust...

Black and white Ss were given recognition training for black and white faces. One experiment asked black and white Ss to describe black or white faces verbally, to recognize faces from verbal descriptions, and to describe similarities and differences in triads of faces. While verbal training did affect verbal usage and verbal recognition performanc...

It has long been known that human behavior si a function of characteristics of both the physical and the psychological environments. Koffka (108), for instance, distinguished between the geographical and the behavioral environ- ment. The behavioral depends on the geographical; behavior depends on both. The geographical environment consists of both...

The 1969 APA convention was characterized by desperate efforts by psychologists to find social relevance in their work (Nelson, 1969). It appears at many psychologists find themselves in conflict when contemplating the problems which they find scientifically exciting and attempt to relate them to social problems; others are concerned with the "publ...

Explored recognition for faces of persons of own and other race in 20 black and 20 white undergraduates at both a predominantly black and a predominantly white university. 10 stimulus photographs each of black and white males were selected from a pool of stimulus photographs for recognition. The d' measure defined by signal detection theory was use...

It is hypothesized that selective attention mediates the effect of attitude on learning and memory and that failures to demonstrate the effect are due to task instructions. Forty-two pro- and 42 antidraft subjects read essays congenial or uncongenial with their attitude under either Opinion, Judgment, or Learning instructions. Immediately, and afte...