for faces, effects of training or experience on identifi-
cation performance, and the other-race effect. Subse-
quent surveys of other students, legal professionals,
potential jurors, and community respondents in the
United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada produced
similar results: More than half the participants did not
identify the known relationships between eyewitness
accuracy and confidence, event violence, event dura-
tion estimates, trained observers, older witnesses, ver-
bal descriptions, and child suggestibility. These
surveys were followed by those in which Likert-type
scale items (ratings on 7-point agree-disagreescales)
were presented to samples of college students and
community adults, with highly comparable results:
Almost half the respondents disagreed with expert
opinion on many items. Despite these differences, lay
responses were, nonetheless, often similar to those of
experts on a subset of the items: the effects of attitudes
and expectations, wording of questions, weapon
focus, event violence, and estimates of the duration of
events. More recently, an assessment of the responses
of potential jurors in Tennessee to items from Kassin’s
survey of experts produced a similar outcome: Jurors
responded significantly differently than experts on 26
of 30 items, with magnitudes of disagreements rang-
ing from 11% to 67%. A small sample of actual jurors
from Washington, D.C., was also surveyed in 1990:
Fewer than half the participants agreed with the cor-
rect responses. Furthermore, in a 2005 telephone sur-
vey, a large sample of potential jurors in Washington,
D.C., were questioned about a smaller number of eye-
witness factors. The authors argued that their results
support the view that potential jurors often differ from
experts in their opinions about and understanding of
many issues. Finally, Canadian researchers recently
constructed surveys in a manner intended to reduce
jargon and professional terminology to improve
understanding by survey respondents. Their results
strongly suggest that assessments of lay beliefs are
influenced by question format and that prior research
may have underestimated current levels of lay knowl-
edge concerning a number of factors, for example, the
relationship between confidence and accuracy.
Nonetheless, even with the friendlier survey format,
disagreement with the experts was apparent for
approximately 50% of the eyewitness topics.Indirect Methods
The indirectapproach to assessing lay knowledge is
based on the distinction between havingknowledgeand making use of it. The direct-method survey
research above has emphasized the former. With indi-
rect methods, on the other hand, participant responses
are used as the basis for determining whether existing
beliefs appear to have influenced the respondents’ judg-
ments about the reliability of eyewitness testimony. In
other examples of this approach, researchers attempt to
increase the levels of knowledge of participants who
serve as “mock jurors” and then ask whether such
knowledge appears to be integrated in judgments about
eyewitness reliability and defendant guilt.
In the first group of studies, research participants
estimated the likelihood of accurate person identifica-
tion by an eyewitness in situations that varied along
several dimensions that had, in fact, been manipulated
in actual experiments—for example, levels of witness
confidence, crime seriousness, and lineup bias. To
determine whether participants were sensitive to these
factors as determinants of eyewitness reliability, their
“postdictive” estimates were compared with the
effects of these same variables in the laboratory
research. In general, participants appeared to be quite
insensitive to the manipulated factors: Estimates of
identification accuracy were overly optimistic; con-
siderable reliance was erroneously placed on witness
confidence, and their estimates usually failed to
reflect the real effects of variables. Another indirect
approach examines data collected from “mock jurors”
who reached verdicts (and other judgments of witness
credibility) after reading case descriptions in which
eyewitness variables that are known to influence iden-
tification accuracy had been manipulated. The results
revealed that the factors recognized by experts as
important determinants of eyewitness accuracy gener-
ally have not been shown to influence mock jurors’
verdicts or credibility evaluations, and some of those
known to be unrelated to witness accuracy (i.e., confi-
dence) did affect such evaluations. Similarly, there is
a disparity between mock jurors’ judgments of factors
that they say are important to eyewitness reliability
and the impact of these factors on their decisions
when case evidence is actually presented to them.
Furthermore, it is one thing to be able to identify
correctly explicitly stated, general relationships between
eyewitness factors and memory but quite another to
have the depth of knowledge to appreciate conceptual
distinctions made at trial by experts about these fac-
tors as they are presented in specific cases. To exam-
ine these questions, researchers have asked whether
beliefs demonstrably held by mock jurors (without
benefit of expert testimony) appear to be integratedEyewitness Memory, Lay Beliefs About——— 301E-Cutler (Encyc)-45463.qxd 11/18/2007 12:42 PM Page 301