Counterintuitive approach may improve eyewitness identification

Experts have devised a novel approach to selecting photos for police line-ups that helps witnesses identify culprits more reliably. In a paper published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , researchers - from the University of California San Diego and Duke University in the United States and the University of Birmingham in the U.K. show for the first time that selecting fillers who match a basic description of the suspect but whose faces are less similar, rather than more, leads to better outcomes than traditional approaches in the field. The counterintuitive technique improves eyewitness performance by about 10 percent. "In practice, police tend to err on the side of picking facially similar fillers for their line-ups,' said John Wixted, the paper's senior author and a professor in the UC San Diego Department of Psychology. "What our study shows is that it is, contrary to intuition, actually better to pick fillers who are facially dissimilar. Doing it this way continues to protect the innocent to the same degree while helping witnesses to correctly identify the guilty more frequently.' In a study of 19,732 participants, the researchers played a mock-crime video depicting a white male stealing an office laptop and then provided photographs of one suspect (either the perpetrator or an innocent suspect) plus five police line-up fillers. The fillers always matched the most basic description of the perpetrator but they varied in how much they facially resembled him.