As a psychology graduate student at Emory University in the late 1970s, I was looking for a way to apply what scientists knew about perception and memory in the laboratory to the real world. I designed a series of experiments that varied lineup size and the similarity of the decoys in the lineups to the suspect. After briefly viewing a video of a person cashing a check, subjects tried to identify that person in a lineup one week later. Based on the results of these experiments, I devised guidelines for lineups that maximized correct identifications and minimized false identifications. But I also was surprised by a counter-intuitive finding: there was no relationship between the level of confidence of the subjects and the accuracy of their identifications.
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