Encyclopedia of Psychology and Law

by providing evidence that it has inflated over time.

Finally, recording confidence is easy. It does not

require specialized equipment or training. It can eas-

ily be incorporated into interviews with witnesses.

Should immediate confidence reports not be recorded,

another common suggestion is to introduce expert

testimony on the malleability of confidence. This

solution is less appealing because research has

demonstrated that mock jurors are relatively insensi-

tive to testimony impugning the correlation between

confidence and accuracy. In some studies, jurors per-

sist in using confidence reports even after being told

that they are only minimally useful in assessing accu-

racy. Therefore, the most reasonable solution is to pre-

vent eyewitnesses’ confidence from inflating in the

first place. The best way to do this is to collect imme-

diate records of confidence reports in both identifica-

tion accuracy and crime details.

Amy Bradfield Douglass

See also Confidence in Identifications; Estimator and System

Variables in Eyewitness Identification; Expert

Psychological Testimony on Eyewitness Identification;

Eyewitness Memory; Identification Tests, Best Practices

in; Juries and Eyewitnesses; Neil v. BiggersCriteria for

Evaluating Eyewitness Identification; Postevent

Information and Eyewitness Memory; Wrongful

Conviction

Further Readings

Baron, R. S., Vandello, J. A., & Brunsman, B. (1996). The

forgotten variable in conformity research: Impact of task

importance on social influence. Journal of Personality

and Social Psychology, 71(5), 915–927.

Bradfield, A., & McQuiston, D. E. (2002). When does

evidence of eyewitness confidence inflation affect

judgments in a criminal trial? Law and Human Behavior,

28 (4), 369–387.

Bradfield, A. L., Wells, G. L., & Olson, E. A. (2002). The

damaging effect of confirming feedback on the relation

between eyewitness certainty and identification accuracy.

Journal of Applied Psychology, 87(1), 112–120.

Lindsay, S. D., Read, J. D., & Sharma, K. (1998). Accuracy

and confidence in person identification: The relationship

is strong when witnessing conditions vary widely.

Psychological Science, 9(3), 215–218.

Luus, C. A. E., & Wells, G. L. (1994). The malleability of

eyewitness confidence: Co-witness and perseverance

effects. Journal of Applied Psychology, 79,714–724.

Sporer, S., Penrod, S., Read, D., & Cutler, B. L. (1995).

Choosing, confidence, and accuracy: A meta-analysis of

the confidence-accuracy relation in eyewitness

identification studies. Psychological Bulletin, 118,

315–327.

CONFLICTTACTICSSCALE(CTS)

Two general types of incidence surveys exist: the

Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS) and the Crime Victim

Surveys (CVS). The former requires people to indicate

what actions they have taken to resolve family con-

flicts; the latter requires people to indicate by what

crimes they have been victimized. The CVS find the

rates of reporting wife assault to the police comparable

with the reporting rates for other assaults. However,

these surveys have a filtering problem such that people

who do not consider their abuse victimization to be a

crime do not respond in the affirmative. Hence, inci-

dence rates of reported spousal abuse, which are not

defined as criminal by the victim, are low. To circum-

vent this filtering problem, Straus, Gelles, and Steinmetz

devised the CTS, which asks respondents to report

modes of conflict resolution in the family. This avoids

the problem of whether the respondent defines the

action as criminal or not and, therefore, attempts to

obtain more accurate estimates of the frequency and

incidence of domestic assault in a general population.

Straus found violence incidence rates with the CTS

were 16 times greater than with the CVS. Presenting

the CTS in the context of normal conflict rather than a

criminal act reduces filters against reporting.

Surveys of Incidence:

Conflict Tactics Surveys

Several surveys using the CTS have been completed.

They include (a) a nationally representative U.S. sam-

ple of 2,143 interviewed in 1974 by Response Analysis

Corporation; (b) a survey of spousal violence against

women in the state of Kentucky, which interviewed

1,793 women; (c) a second national survey completed

by Straus and Gelles in 1985; and (d) a sample of

1,045 for the Province of Alberta, Canada. These were

each obtained by a survey that interviews a representa-

tive sample drawn from a general population about

experiences of being victimized by violence during

family conflicts and the type of actions used to resolve

Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS)——— 145

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