The Effect of Retention Interval on the Eyewitness Identification Confidence–Accuracy Relationship

Abstract

Individual researchers express a variety of views about the eyewitness confidence–accuracy relationship, but an argument could be made that the consensus view in the field is that (1) confidence is, at best, a weak indicator of accuracy, (2) the confidence–accuracy relationship becomes weaker still as the retention interval increases, and (3) eyewitnesses who express high confidence tend to be overconfident – perhaps even more so following a long retention interval. Here, we reanalyze the data from four previous retention interval studies in terms of suspect ID accuracy ( Mickes, 2015 ). We argue that this measure is more relevant to the information sought by a court of law than either a correlation coefficient or a calibration curve (the two traditional confidence–accuracy measures). The results of our reanalysis suggest that the confidence accuracy relationship remains strong – and that high-confidence IDs remain highly accurate – even after retention intervals as long as 9 months.