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Category: Project

Description: In order to prevent miscarriages of justice, it is imperative to find reliable ways to assess identification accuracy. Although confidence can be a valid postdictor of identification accuracy, in some instances, eyewitnesses are overconfident or underconfident. We constructed, validated, and evaluated a new eyewitness metamemory scale (EMS), to examine whether eyewitness metamemory could aid in distinguishing accurate from inaccurate identifications and confidence estimations. Participants (N = 354) filled in the EMS and existing general metamemory instruments (GMI), after which half of the participants (N = 178) performed a standard identification paradigm with an unbiased lineup. The EMS was found to have good psychometric properties and was better than the GMI at predicting identification accuracy. Calibration analyses showed that overall for choosers (fillers and suspect), low metamemory raters were well calibrated whereas high metamemory raters were overconfident. However, when analyzing suspect identifications, we found that participants with high scores on certain metamemory components were more accurate than participants with low scores, given that they made an identification with low confidence. In conclusion, we found that if researchers want to generalize their findings to the courtroom, it is essential to analyze suspect identifications independently from filler identifications, as these analyses can yield different results. Furthermore, the current study found that eyewitness metamemory was both predictive of identifications accuracy and could increase the diagnosticity of the confidence postdictor. Thus, eyewitness metamemory instruments can be a valuable tool when distinguishing accurate from inaccurate identifications.