Presence of administrators differentially impacts eyewitness discriminability for same‐ and other‐race identifications

Abstract

SummaryBest practice guidelines recommend that eyewitness lineup administrators be blind to a suspect's identity, but no research has investigated whether the mere presence of a lineup administrator impacts eyewitness identification decisions. Informed by social facilitation theory, we predicted that the presence of an audience would differentially impact identification accuracy for same‐ and other‐race identifications. Participants (N = 191) viewed same‐ and other‐race lineups either with an audience or alone. Although the presence of an audience did not directly impact identification accuracy, significant indirect effects indicated that the audience provoked evaluation apprehension which hindered other‐race identification accuracy and improved same‐race identification accuracy. We suggest that using double‐blind lineup procedures may not sufficiently protect eyewitness identification accuracy when making other‐race lineup decisions in the presence of others.