The New Reality: Non-Eyewitness Identifications in a Surveillance World

Abstract

Cognitive scientists have firmly established the risk of eyewitness misidentifications, and in response, courts have adopted legal safeguards to forestall this possibility; however, there are few safeguards against misidentifications by non-eyewitnesses. We define non-eyewitnesses as people who did not actually observe an event but nonetheless testify about who they think is depicted in a video of the event on the basis of their prior familiarity with the person they believe is depicted. In this review, we discuss the accuracy with which people typically recognize people from videos; in fact, these non-eyewitness identifications are far from perfect. We then explore seven factors that affect the accuracy of non-eyewitness identifications and organize these factors around three categories of bias—case-specific bias, person-specific bias, and general cognitive bias—that are likely to reduce the probability of a correct identification. We conclude with a proposed two-prong framework for determining the admissibility of non-eyewitness identifications in court and call for the adoption of legal safeguards against non-eyewitness misidentifications.