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Police Lineups as Experiments

Social Methodology as a Framework for Properly Conducted Lineups

Iowa State University

C. A. Elizabeth Luus

Iowa State University

Research findings over the last decade have given rise to guidelines about how to minimize the likelihood of false identifications in police lineups and photo spreads. It is argued here that experimental social psychology's common understanding of factors that contaminate research experiments, such as demand characteristics, experimenter bias, and lack of control groups, has been the principal framework leading to hypotheses about how to improve police-conducted lineups. The analogy between a methodologically sound social psychology experiment and a properly conducted lineup has guided eyewitness identification research implicitly; in this article the analogy is expanded and made explicit. Lineup research examples deriving from the lineup-as-experiment analogy, such as the mock-witness control group and the blank-lineup control, are described. Finally, it is argued that research findings that are modeled on the lineup-as-experiment analogy are natural system variables that might be especially immune to some of the criticisms that have been launched against expert testimony on eyewitness matters.

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 16, No. 1, 106-117 (1990)
DOI: 10.1177/0146167290161008


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