Degree of Detail of Eyewitness Testimony and Mock Juror Judgments1

The influence of the degree of detail of eyewitness testimony on two sides of a court case was investigated in two experiments. In the first experiment subject-jurors read a civil court case involving an automobile-pedestrian accident. The plaintiff and the defendant presented conflicting eyewitness accounts. Judgments of the relative credibility of the eyewitnesses on each side and the percentage of negligence of the parties were influenced by the relative degree of detail of the eyewitness testimony on each side. In the second experiment subject-jurors read a criminal court case involving robbery and murder. The prosecution and defense presented conflicting eyewitness accounts. The degree of detail of the prosecution eyewitness testimony influenced judgments of guilt and judgments of the credibility of the eyewitnesses. An examination of the reasons for verdicts and credibility judgments revealed that some subjects inferred that an eyewitness who gave testimony with a greater degree of detail had a better memory for the trivial details and the culprit than an eyewitness who gave testimony with a lesser degree of detail. Implications of these results for the legal system are discussed.

[1]  Shelley E. Taylor,et al.  Stalking the elusive "vividness" effect. , 1982 .

[2]  R. Hastie,et al.  The relationship between memory and judgment depends on whether the judgment task is memory-based or on-line , 1986 .

[3]  R. Lindsay,et al.  Accuracy, confidence, and juror perceptions in eyewitness identification. , 1979, The Journal of applied psychology.

[4]  G. Bower,et al.  Judgmental biases resulting from differing availabilities of arguments. , 1980 .

[5]  William M. O'Barr,et al.  Speech style and impression formation in a court setting: The effects of “powerful” and “powerless” speech , 1978 .

[6]  E F Loftus,et al.  Trivial persuasion in the courtroom: the power of (a few) minor details. , 1989, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[7]  R. Lindsay,et al.  Can People Detect Eyewitness-Identification Accuracy Within and Across Situations? , 1981 .

[8]  Melvin Manis,et al.  Can the availability heuristic explain vividness effects , 1986 .

[9]  W. Griffitt,et al.  Impact of testimonial evidence as a function of witness characteristics , 1978 .

[10]  D. Kahneman,et al.  Attention and Effort , 1973 .

[11]  M. R. Leippe,et al.  The Influence of Eyewitness Nonidentifications on Mock‐Jurors' Judgments of a Court Case1 , 1985 .

[12]  M. R. Leippe,et al.  How do triers of fact infer the accuracy of eyewitness identifications? Using memory for peripheral detail can be misleading. , 1981 .

[13]  J. Cacioppo,et al.  The Effects of Involvement on Responses to Argument Quantity and Quality: Central and Peripheral Routes to Persuasion , 1984 .