Are they right or wrong? Investigating the ability to judge the accuracy of eyewitnesses in same-and -other race identifications

Abstract

Past research has investigated the cross-race effect in the context of eyewitnesses and jury decision-making. The main goal of my thesis was to gain further insight into participants’ knowledge of the cross-race effect and how this impacted participants’ discrimination of same- and cross-race identifications. One hundred fifty-nine undergraduate students from UOIT viewed a series of showup identification videos. I found that participants were better able to discriminate accurate from inaccurate same-race identifications than cross-race identifications. However, participants believed White witnesses more and found them more credible than South Asian witnesses. Further research should investigate other conditions that influence people’s abilities to discriminate accurate from inaccurate eyewitness identifications.