Eyewitness testimonies serve as heavily weighted evidence in criminal investigations. Despite this, research has demonstrated the fallibility of eyewitness memory, especially for crimes involving more than one perpetrator. The task for multi-perpetrator eyewitnesses is unique as they not only have to identify perpetrators, but describe the roles played in the crime and then assign an action to each perpetrator. This study examined factors affecting perpetrator identification, role recollection, and perpetrator-role pairing. Participants (N = 216) watched a staged video of a crime and then completed online tasks based on what they saw. At encoding, participants viewed one, two, or five perpetrators. Participants were either required to identify perpetrators from line-ups or were given images of each offender. In addition, they were either required to describe each perpetrator's role or were given this information. For methodological reasons, no perpetrator-absent line-ups were included in the current research as participants who viewed this kind of line-up had no potential for scoring along the perpetrator-role pairing measure. The results suggest that, as the number of perpetrators increases, participants made fewer correct identifications, role recollections, and pairings. However, there was no significant difference in identification accuracy between the one-and two-perpetrator conditions. The findings also show that while receiving experimenter-defined roles yields more accurate pairings, receiving photographs of the perpetrators does not. Future research is needed into the pairing process, the findings of which could be used to improve police procedure for interviewing multiperpetrator eyewitnesses.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:uct/oai:localhost:11427/35627 |
| Date | 31 January 2022 |
| Creators | Allen, Caroline |
| Contributors | Tredoux, Colin, Nortje, Alicia |
| Publisher | Faculty of Humanities, Department of Psychology |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Master Thesis, Masters, MPhil |
| Format | application/pdf |
Page generated in 0.002 seconds