10ofRods
Verified Anthropologist
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MOO
But if the murderer were a stranger, the witness might be extremely likely to misidentify the murderer. And I’ve seen studies that claim that there’s not that much correlation between a witness’s confidence and accuracy. That matches my personal experience, too.
MOO
I do this thing in lab where I show two kinds of faces: people who are famous enough that a good number of students will know who they are, and complete strangers. I have pictures of all different ethnicities, ages, genders, etc. The students have to supply their own age, ethnicity, gender and a few other variables, depending on what we're doing.
It's amazing how not even some of the most famous faces are not identified by 100% of the students (say, Ronald Reagan - his face is apparently being forgotten). I then ask them to describe some of the non-celebrity faces in another exercise (they each choose three pictures to describe). Their descriptions are at variance with each other, even with the face pictures right in front of them.
A month later, I choose (for each student) one of those stranger faces and ask if they've ever seen it before and about half will say "no, they haven't." Which is why we professionally study forensics and. have a particular language for nose types, estimates of intraorbital distance (they're. supposed to use a ruler - and they'll still get different measurements on the two attempts), chin types, skin undertones, skin color, eye color and so on. They'll even given fairly disparate answers to "what age is this person?" on each attempt, perhaps because in the meantime, they've been studying the science of faces? LEO who happen to be in the class do much better than the average student, but aren't perfect. My anthropology colleagues do pretty well (as we've all been trained in this) whereas the mathematicians and historians do not do as well. The ASL students are better than an average group of students.
Witnesses are really not the best at identifying people they see only briefly. If someone does an unusual act (as in the Pear Film exercise), then they are much better remembered. So BL offering the $200 to the couple he hitched with, made himself more memorable. They probably stared at him, then talked about him after he left the car...