Distorted retrospective eyewitness reports as functions of feedback and delay.

Participant–witnesses viewed a crime video and attempted to identify the culprit from a culprit-absent lineup. The 253 mistaken-identification eyewitnesses were randomly given confirming, disconfirming, or no feedback regarding their identifications. Feedback was immediate or delayed 48 hr, and measures were immediate or delayed 48 hr. Confirming, but not disconfirming, feedback led to distortions of eyewitnesses’ recalled confidence, amount of attention paid during witnessing, goodness of view, ability to make out facial details, length of time to identification, and other measures related to the witnessing experience. Unexpectedly, neither delaying the measures nor delaying feedback for 48 hr moderated these effects. The results underscore the need for double-blind lineups and neutral assessments of eyewitnesses’ certainty and other judgments prior to feedback. Although courts have long been concerned with what an eyewitness might be told before viewing a lineup, courts have not shown concern for what an eyewitness might be told after he or she makes an identification (Wells et al., 1998). This is understandable to the extent that courts are focused only on how suggestive procedures might affect the identification decision itself. After all, the identification has already happened, and anything said after the identification could not work backward to influence it. This narrow focus on the identification itself, however, overlooks the profound influence that postidentification suggestions have on the testimony that the eyewitness might later give about the identification. Particularly important is the confidence that the eyewitness recalls having had in his or her identification, what the eyewitness later says about the witnessing conditions, and other testimonial reconstructions that the eyewitness gives of the event. Postidentification feedback from the lineup administrator (e.g., “Good, you identified the suspect” or “No, that person was just a lineup filler”) has powerful and broad effects on how the eyewitness recalls the original event and on how the eyewitness recalls the identification decision, an effect called the postidentification feedback effect. The original experiments demonstrating the postidentification feedback effect (Wells & Bradfield, 1998) had participant– witnesses identify a person from a culprit-absent lineup; hence, all identifications were mistaken. Participant–witnesses were then randomly assigned to receive confirming feedback (“Good, you identified the suspect”), disconfirming feedback (“Actually, the suspect was Number ,” which was a lineup member not chosen by the eyewitness), or no feedback at all. Relative to those who received no feedback, those who received confirming feedback inflated their recollections of certainty, and those who received disconfirming feedback deflated their recollections of certainty. Secondary accounts of the postidentification feedback effect usually refer only to the effect of postidentification feedback on retrospective confidence. However, postidentification feedback affects not only retrospective reports of confidence, but also eyewitnesses’ retrospective reports of how good their view was, how much attention they paid to the culprit while witnessing the event, how long they took to make the identification decision, how well they could make out details of the culprit’s face, how easy it was to make the identification decision, and other measures. Collectively, we refer to these various measures as retrospective reports of the witnessing experience. Any psychological interpretations of the postidentification feedback effect must take into account this broad range of effects on retrospective reports of the witnessing experience rather than merely the effect on retrospective