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Eye Witness Identification Essay

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Although the phrase “they all look alike to me” is widely known and used as a joke

(Goldstein & Chance, 1985) the implications that the phrase yields may not be as widely

understood as they should be. In the criminal justice system, eyewitness identifications can play a

major role in the decisions made by jurors even though it has been shown that jurors have little

awareness of factors that affect the reliability of eyewitness accounts (Cutler, Penrod, & Dexter,

1990). One such factor is identifications made by people identifying someone of a different race,

(when describing race as Caucasian, of African descent, of Asian descent, or Latino),

which can be referred to as other-race identification or other-race …show more content…

Although the clerks showed little own-race

bias and were correct less than half the time, the white clerk’s ability to identify the black

customers was substantially related to the amount of self-reported cross-racial experience they

had. But the black clerks didn’t show the same relation. It could be possible that the previous

experience that the white store clerks had with black people may have been positive or negative

experiences. These experiences may have caused them to pay greater attention to black

customers. For example, if the store clerk was robbed by a black customer, he may have a

prejudice against them and now watches them more closely. Here, it is not just the quantity of

experience someone has with another race that can affect accuracy of identification, it is also the

quality. To judge whether the quality of the experience may have affected the accuracy, a

structured survey can be given to the store clerks which asks them specific questions on what type

of contact they have had with the other race, not just how much. In another study of the effects

of experience on the accuracy of face recognition, Paul Lavrakas, John Buri and Mark Mayzner

tested the ability of white subjects to identify black faces. Both quantity and quality of experience

are considered. To measure these, subjects were asked for their familiarity with blacks
(quantitative experience) and their current

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