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Issues, 17,283–316.CONFORMITY INEYEWITNESSREPORTS
Eyewitness research has repeatedly shown that exposure
to postevent information can affect a witness’s ability to
accurately report details of an originally encoded event.
In everyday life, postevent information might be
encountered when individuals who have shared the
same experience discuss this with one another. Even
when each person has witnessed the same event, their
memories are likely to differ because of naturally occur-
ring differences in the details attended to at the time, as
well as differences in each person’s ability to accurately
remember those details. Despite initial differences in
recollections of an event, when people talk about their
memories they can influence each other such that their
subsequent individual memory reports become similar.
The phenomenon of people’s memory reports becoming
similar to one another’s following a discussion has been
referred to as “memory conformity.” This entry dis-
cusses the ways in which researchers have investigated
conformity in eyewitness reports, typical research find-
ings, and current theoretical explanations for the mem-
ory conformity effect.
When memory conformity occurs in the context of
a forensic investigation, there can be serious implica-
tions. For example, it might be assumed that seem-
ingly corroborative witness statements are a product
of independent witnesses with consistent versions of
events, when in fact memory conformity might be
responsible for the similarities if there has been some
form of interaction between cowitnesses. Therefore, it
is important that the police take care not to give undue
weight to the consistency of statements from wit-
nesses who may have talked when judging the accu-
racy of an eyewitness account.
A typical paradigm used to investigate memory
conformity in eyewitness reports involves pairs of par-
ticipants being led to believe that they have encoded
the same stimuli (often a simulated crime event shown
on video or slides), when in reality they are shownstimuli that bear a similarity but differ in critical ways.
These critical differences can take the form of added
items (where one dyad member sees an item that his
or her partner did not and vice versa) or contradicting
items (where both dyad members see the same item,
but details of this item differ in terms of color or prod-
uct). This manipulation allows different features of
the encoded stimuli to be observed by each partici-
pant. Dyad members are then given time to discuss
what they have seen. An individual recall test for the
originally encoded stimuli is then administered to
examine the effects of cowitness discussion on mem-
ory. The dependent variable of interest is whether, and
how often, witnesses report an item at test that they
have encountered from a cowitness as opposed to see-
ing with their own eyes.
Alternative procedures to investigate memory con-
formity include using a confederate to act as a cowit-
ness and purposefully introduce items of misleading
postevent information into the discussion. Other
experiments have presented cowitness information
indirectly by incorporating it into a recall question-
naire, or the experimenter reveals responses that have
purportedly been given by other witnesses.
A common finding for memory conformity research,
regardless of procedure or stimuli used, is that social
influences encountered in the form of postevent infor-
mation from a cowitness can mediate accuracy in joint
recall and recognition tasks, with individuals often
exhibiting conformity to the suggestions and judg-
ments of others. Significant conformity effects are
also evident following a delay in postdiscussion mem-
ory tests that are performed alone.
Theoretical explanations for conformity in eyewit-
ness reports share strong parallels with those account-
ing for the effects of postevent information on
memory. For example, research has shown that source
misattributions account in part for conformity in eye-
witness reports, as individuals sometimes claim to
remember seeing items of information that have actu-
ally been encountered from a cowitness. Informational
motivations to report accurate information at test are
also thought to play a role. Here, individuals choose
to report the postevent information encountered from
a cowitness at test if it is accepted as veridical.
Informational motivations to conform are often evident
in situations where individuals doubt the accuracy of
their own memory or when the information encoun-
tered from another individual convinces them that their
initial judgment was erroneous. In support of this,Conformity in Eyewitness Reports——— 147C-Cutler (Encyc)-45463.qxd 11/18/2007 12:41 PM Page 147