“Sounding Black”: Speech Stereotypicality Activates Racial Stereotypes and Expectations About Appearance

Black Americans who are perceived as more racially phenotypical—that is, who possess more physical traits that are closely associated with their race—are more often associated with racial stereotypes. These stereotypes, including assumptions about criminality, can influence how Black Americans are treated by the legal system. However, it is unclear whether other forms of racial stereotypicality, such as a person’s way of speaking, also activate stereotypes about Black Americans. We investigated the links between speech stereotypicality and racial stereotypes (Experiment 1) and racial phenotype bias (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, participants listened to audio recordings of Black speakers and rated how stereotypical they found the speaker, the likely race and nationality of the speaker, and indicated which adjectives the average person would likely associate with this speaker. In Experiment 2, participants listened to recordings of weakly or strongly stereotypical Black American speakers and indicated which of two faces (either weakly or strongly phenotypical) was more likely to be the speaker’s. We found that speakers whose voices were rated as more highly stereotypical for Black Americans were more likely to be associated with stereotypes about Black Americans (Experiment 1) and with more stereotypically Black faces (Experiment 2). These findings indicate that speech stereotypicality activates racial stereotypes as well as expectations about the stereotypicality of an individual’s appearance. As a result, the activation of stereotypes based on speech may lead to bias in suspect descriptions or eyewitness identifications.

The Naturalized Epistemology Approach to Evidence

Studying evidence law as part of naturalized epistemology means using the tools and results of the sciences to evaluate evidence rules based on the accuracy of the verdicts they are likely to produce. This chapter introduces the approach and addresses skeptical concerns about the value of systematic empirical research for evidence scholarship, focusing, in particular, on worries about the external validity of jury simulation studies. Finally, turning to applications, it discusses possible reforms regarding eyewitness identifications and character evidence.

Lineup Instruction Verbiage's Effect on the Accuracy of Eyewitness Identifications: Michigan's Procedure

ABSTRACT Our study examined the effects of biased and unbiased lineup instructions verbiage on the accuracy of eyewitness identification in a suspect-absent photographic lineup. Seventy subjects were randomly assigned to either a biased instruction condition or an unbiased instruction condition where they watched a mocked crime video, solved word-search puzzles for five minutes, completed a suspect-absent photographic lineup, and then completed an online post-witness experience feedback questionnaire. The unbiased condition utilized photographic lineup instructions from the State Bar of Michigan's Eyewitness Identification Task Force recommended policy writing guide. For the biased condition, the instructions alluded to subjects that the suspect was present. Subjects in the unbiased condition answered correctly 45.7% of the time compared to 28.6% of those in the biased condition. Chi-square test for independence indicated no significant association between the lineup instructions verbiage and the accuracy of eyewitness identification rates. Binomial logistic regression found that the confidence level in the identification choice made, ease of making an identification, decision making time, ability to recognize the lineup appeinstructions, and group condition were not significant predictors of subjects correctly identifying the suspect. Our results would suggest that the verbiage of the lineup instructions does not increase accuracy of eyewitness identifications.

Exonerating the Wrongfully Convicted

Chapter 2 examines the critical role DNA analysis has played in exonerating the wrongfully convicted. Since the first DNA exoneration in 1988 of Gary Dotson, falsely convicted of rape in Illinois, hundreds of people have been exonerated through DNA analysis, including many who were on death row; minority groups have been disproportionately represented (approximately 70%). This chapter examines the various reasons that innocent people have been convicted, including coerced confessions and mistaken eyewitness identifications, and discusses several cases in which DNA evidence led to exoneration. It also discusses the establishment of the innocence movement, from the founding in 1983 of Centurion Ministries, an organization devoted to freeing innocent people from prison; to the formation in 1992 of the Innocence Project, which used DNA to free the innocent; to the global movement of today, in which more than 100 innocence organizations around the world work on reform and litigation.

The language of accurate and inaccurate eyewitnesses

Experimental psychologists have – for decades – espoused the unreliability of eyewitness identifications, but the advent of new statistical techniques such as confidence-accuracy characteristic analysis has revealed that eyewitness identifications are much more reliable than previously thought. When an eyewitness identifies the suspect with high confidence from an initial and properly-administered lineup, for example, that suspect is highly likely to be the person who originally committed the crime. The way confidence is collected in the laboratory – using a numeric rating scale – differs from the way confidence is collected in the real world – often by asking eyewitnesses to express their confidence in their own words. What is the best method for collecting an eyewitness’s level of confidence? To answer this question, we applied a novel machine-learning methodology to investigate the natural language of accurate and inaccurate eyewitnesses. This method revealed that verbal confidence statements provide much diagnostic information about the accuracy of identifications. Moreover, verbal confidence statements provide unique diagnostic information that is not otherwise captured by traditional indicators of identification accuracy such as numeric confidence ratings. However, the diagnostic value of a verbal confidence statement depends in part on the face recognition ability of the eyewitness: the natural language of strong face recognizers is more diagnostic than the natural language of weak face recognizers. These results are theoretically interesting, but from an applied perspective, this machine-learning methodology may prove useful to those in the criminal justice system that must evaluate eyewitnesses’ verbal confidence statements.

Active exploration of faces in police lineups increases discrimination accuracy

Eyewitness identifications play a key role in the justice system, but eyewitnesses make errors, often with profound consequences. Errors are more likely when the witness is of a different race to the suspect, due to a phenomenon called the Own Race Bias (ORB). ORB is characterized as an encoding-based deficit, but has been predominantly tested using static photographs of people facing the camera. We used findings from basic science and innovative technologies to develop and test whether a novel interactive lineup procedure, wherein witnesses can rotate and dynamically view the lineup faces from different angles, improves witness discrimination accuracy and attenuates the ORB, compared to the most widely used procedure in laboratories and police forces around the world—the static frontal-pose photo lineup. No novel procedure has previously been shown to improve witness discrimination accuracy. In Experiment 1, participants (N=220) identified own-race or other-race culprits from sequentially presented interactive lineups or static frontal-pose photo lineups. In Experiment 2, participants (N=8,507) identified own-race or other-race culprits from interactive lineups that were either presented sequentially, simultaneously wherein the faces could be moved independently, or simultaneously wherein the faces moved jointly into the same angle. Interactive lineups enhanced witnesses’ discriminability compared to static lineups, especially when they were presented simultaneously, for both own-race and other-race identifications. Our findings suggest that ORB is an encoding-based phenomenon, and exemplify how basic science can be used to address the important applied policy issue on how best to conduct a police lineup and reduce eyewitness errors.