Psychology and the Law
Fall 2021
Eyewitness Testimony
Terms
Confirmatory bias
Weapon focus effect
Other race effect
“dud” effect
Double-blind testing
Post-identification feedback effect
System variable
Estimator variable
People/Court Cases (hint: focus on why the people and court cases are important)
State v. Henderson (hint: focus on the conclusion)
Concepts
Know the three stages of memory (encoding, storage, retrieval). We remember best at what kind of arousal?
What are the breakdowns in memory at the storage stage?
What are the main takeaways of the Dr. Loftus video?
Witnesses are ____________ influential to jurors. Witnesses tend to ____________ the accuracy of their
identifications. Eyewitness confidence is generally a ___________ predictor of witness accuracy.
“The only time that confidence is known to be a highly reliable predictor of accuracy is
_________________________________, before there is much opportunity for memory contamination to
occur.”
In class, we discussed five major ways that lineup administrators can reduce errors. What are those five ways?
Be familiar enough with these to be able to ‘spot’ these issues in hypothetical lineups.
What is coincidental resemblance? Why are good fillers particularly important to diminish concerns about
coincidental resemblance?