Live presentation for eyewitness identification is not superior to photo or video presentation.
Eva Rubínová, Ryan J. Fitzgerald, Stefana Juncu, Eva Ribbers, Lorraine Hope, James D. Sauer
Abstract
Eyewitnesses are widely believed to have a better chance of identifying a perpetrator from a live identificationprocedure than from photo or video alternatives. To test this live superiority hypothesis, prospective studentsand their parents (N = 1048) became unsuspecting witnesses to staged events and were randomly assigned tolive, photo, or video identification procedures. In Experiment 1, participants viewed a single person at theidentification procedure. In Experiment 2, participants viewed a lineup of six people. Across experiments, liveidentification procedures did not improve eyewitness identification performance. The results show that evenunder experimental settings designed to eliminate the disadvantages of conducting live lineups in practice, livepresentation confers no benefit to eyewitnesses.