Ordered Questions Bias Eyewitnesses and Jurors

Eyewitnesses play an important role in the justice system. But suggestive questioning can distort eyewitness memory and confidence, and those distorted beliefs influence jurors (Loftus, 2005; Penrod & Cutler, 1995). Recent research, however, hints that suggestion is not necessary. Simply changing the order of a set of trivia questions altered people's beliefs about their accuracy on those questions (Weinstein & Roediger, 2010, 2012). I wondered to what degree eyewitnesses' beliefs—and in turn the jurors who evaluate them—would be affected by this simple change to the order in which they answer questions. Across a number of experiments in Part 1 of my thesis, I show that the order of questions matters: Eyewitnesses reported higher accuracy and were more confident about their memory when questions seemed initially easy than when they seemed initially difficult. In addition, jurors' beliefs about eyewitnesses closely matched those of the eyewitnesses themselves. But why does the order of questions matter? How does this simple rearrangement produce these alarming effects? Across a number of experiments in Part 2 of my thesis, I explore the extent to which the data are consistent with an explanation where eyewitnesses rapidly form an impression of their performance that is resistant to change. Taken together, these findings have implications for eyewitness metacognition and for eyewitness questioning procedures.