Monotonous Social Environments and the Identification of Crime Suspects: A Comparison of Police Cadets and Civilian College Students

Abstract

This study compares the accuracy of eyewitness accounts provided by police cadets and civilians in Korea. Participants were 50 male cadets from a police college, and 100 male and 104 female civilian college students who watched a videotaped enactment of a robbery. The next day, they were asked to identify the perpetrator who was photographed in different angles and outfits together with 40 photographs of other individuals. Analyses within the framework of signal detection theory suggest that the major difference between the police and the civilian groups was in their perceptual sensitivity rather than in their judgmental criteria, with the police cadets being inferior to the civilians in perceptual sensitivity. However, a strong positive correlation was found between the observed sensitivity index and the observed criterion index. Results suggested that (1) visually monotonous social environments may decrease perceptual sensitivity in the identification of people, (2) police cadets are no better at avoiding false negative errors, i.e., mistakenly identifying the true suspect as an innocent, than civilian college students, and (3) perceptual sensitivity in the identification of people is strongly related to judgmental criteria, presumably because personal emphasis is on individuality.