[Theresa]

So, like I have been telling the conspiracy theorists on other threads....don't get a full head of steam about eyewitness testimony. It is not fool proof. So if some guy insists he saw something, the more he insists the more skeptical you should be.

For example the article in Newsmax about flight 587. An eyewitness was quoted....

"No tail fell off, not before the explosion. I swear to that," Lynch told the paper's Steve Dunleavy. The eyewitness said there was absolutely no doubt about what he saw. "

"Absolutely no doubt." Yeah, uh huh, sure. I imagine he's being sincere...but is he really right? Don't take it to the bank.

[Theresa]

"Brimacombe noted that an eyewitness’s confidence can also be inflated if the police officer conducting the lineup expresses satisfaction with the choice the eyewitness makes. "

I also expect that eyewitness confidence can be inflated if a REPORTER expresses satisfaction with the witnesses side of the story.

[Lancey Howard]

Theresa,
In case you didn't see it, you may want to search FR for Attitude Canneling and Brainwashing (written by RLK) for a really good read. The piece expands greatly on the article which you have posted here.
Regards,
LH

[Lancey Howard]

fyi

[Mitchell]

Elizabeth Loftus, at the University of Washington, has done a lot of research in this area.

[Valin]

From what I understand it's one of the least reliable.

[John H K]

One unfortunate thing is, if a victim (say, of Rape) is presented with a lineup that DOESN'T have the actual rapist in the the lineup, they'll still usually pick out the one person in the lineup who looks most like the Rapist and will often be quite confident that they have picked the perpetrator.

This has been behind many of the recent cases where inmates were released because of DNA testing. If the real perp is in a lineup, overwhelmingly, the right person is picked..but any witness viewing any lineup that DOESN'T have the perp can lead to disaster.

Contributing to this is the well-documented race problem...."They all look alike" is considered a racist statement, but when people view people of other ethnicities or races, they have huge problems. It's been documented asians have difficulties telling whites and blacks apart, whites have trouble telling asians and blacks apart, and black Africans actually would have difficulty, say, telling swedes and Afghanis apart, though the differences are obvious to us. This is made worse when you have little contact with the race in question. Until I went to college, I would have not been able to tell Vietnamese from Chinese from Japanese from Cambodians...now I can, and all of those groups can tell each other from one another, for example.

If a white woman who has been raped by a black man views a lineup of police suspects picked up based on her description, but the real perp ISN'T in the lineup, there, tragically, is an extremely high chance she'll pick out the guy who looks most like the perp, and she'll very confidently point him out in a trial and say "He raped me."

[mlo]

Interesting post.

[RLK]

"Pre-trial publicity can be quite biased and people are ripe to be influenced,"

-------------------------

Most trials are not conducted in the courtroom, but on the front steps in front of the media. Beyond that, I doubt what most people say.