Accuracy, confidence, and juror perceptions in eyewitness identification.

Subjects of both sexes individually witnessed the staged theft of a calculator. The 127 witnesses were then given the opportunity to identify the thief from a six-person picture array; from this sample, 24 accurate-identification witnesses and 18 inaccurate-identification witnesses were cross-examined with either leading or nonleading questions. Jurors were unable to distinguish accurate from inaccurate witnesses across the 42 cross-examination sessions (d' = .02). However, jurors in the leading-questions conditions were significantly more likely to believe accurate than inaccurate witnesses (<f = .35), whereas the reverse effect held for nonleading questions (<f = — .39). Jurors' attributions of witness confidence were unrelated to witness accuracy, even though these attributions accounted for 50% of the variance in jurors' decisions to believe witnesses. The poor accuracy-confidence relationship among witnesses is discussed in relation to the research on probability calibration.