The accuracy–confidence relationship in an eyewitness task: anxiety as a modifier

The Accuracy±Confidence Relationshipin an Eyewitness Task: Anxiety as a Modifier

JENNIFER NOLAN and ROSLYN MARKHAM*University of Sydney, Australia

SUMMARY

The present study investigated the role of anxiety as a moderator of the relationship betweenaccuracy and confidence in an eyewitness recall task. Participants selected as high or lowanxious on a test anxiety scale viewed a video clip of a crime. One week later they answeredverbally a series of questions about the video, rating their confidence in each answer.Observers were shown a video-recording of each participant's test session and rated howconfident they appeared overall. It was argued that people high in test anxiety would appraisetheir performance to a greater degree than low-anxious people, resulting in a significantcorrelation between accuracy and subjective confidence for high-anxious but not for low-anxious participants. The results obtained supported this hypothesis, and found similarrelationships between accuracy and perceived confidence. Highly anxious participantsexpressed less overall confidence in their answers than low anxious participants. & 1998John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Appl. Cognit. Psychol. 12: 43±54 (1998)

Eyewitnesses are among the most influential resources that a prosecuting attorneyhas as s/he seeks to convict a defendant in a criminal trial (e.g., Wrightsman, 1991).A substantial body of research into the accuracy of eyewitness reports, however, hasrevealed that eyewitnesses are often not very accurate in either their testimony oridentifications and that jurors continually overestimate their accuracy (e.g., Cutler,Penrod and Dexter, 1990; Lindsay, Wells and O'Connor, 1989; Loftus, 1974). It isimportant to investigate, therefore, which aspects of eyewitness testimony aretypically used by jurors to judge witness credibility. Studies have consistentlydocumented that jurors intuitively believe that eyewitness confidence, whether statedexplicitly in verbal terms or expressed nonverbally, is a valid predictor of theaccuracy of eyewitness testimony and identification (e.g., Cutler, Penrod and Stuvey,1988; Cutler et al., 1990; Deffenbacher and Loftus, 1982; Kassin, Rigby and Castillo,1991; Leippe, Manion and Romanczyk, 1992; Lindsay et al., 1989; Sporer, 1993;Wells, Ferguson and Lindsay, 1981; Whitley and Greenberg, 1986). Cutler et al.'s(1988) study, for example, found that of ten identification variables, only witnessconfidence had a reliable effect on jurors' judgments as to the probability that theidentification had been correct.

CCC 0888±4080/98/010043±12 $17.50 Received 21 October 1996& 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Accepted 7 March 1997

APPLIED COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY, VOL. 12, 43±54 (1998)

*Correspondence to: Dr Roslyn Markham, Department of Psychology, University of Sydney, N.S.W.2006, Australia.

Eyewitness confidence may be classified as either (a) subjective confidence, whichis the eyewitness's self-rated confidence in the accuracy of his/her memory report, or(b) perceived confidence, which is how confident a person appears to an observer.Indices of perceived confidence include verbal utterances, facial expressions, andother non-verbal cues (Kassin et al., 1991; Leippe et al., 1992). A person's perceivedconfidence would be expected to reflect his/her subjective confidence. Thisrelationship has been confirmed in various studies (e.g., Kassin et al., 1991; Wellset al., 1979; Whitley and Greenberg, 1986). Whitley and Greenberg (1986), forexample, found perceived confidence ratings to be positively related to explicitsubjective confidence judgments, and negatively related to the frequency ofhesitations and hedges that occurred during recall.

It would seem that the acceptance by jurors that there is a strong positiverelationship between eyewitness accuracy and confidence is unjustified (e.g.,Weingardt, Leonesio and Loftus, 1994), with some researchers suggesting thatthere is almost no relationship (e.g., Clifford and Hollin, 1981; Clifford and Scott,1978; Deffenbacher, Brown and Sturgill, 1978; Leippe, Wells and Ostrom, 1978;Smith, Kassin and Ellsworth, 1989; Wells et al., 1981). Numerous studies, however,have found reliable positive correlations between accuracy and confidence (e.g.,Murray and Wells, 1982; Sporer, 1992; Yarmey, 1993), and Wells and Turtle (1987)pointed out that even non-significant correlations are almost always positive. Themost appropriate conclusion from a meta-analysis across 35 studies would seem tobe that confidence and accuracy are modestly related, at least for identification(Bothwell, Deffenbacher and Brigham, 1987), a conclusion supported by the meta-analysis reported by Sporer, Penrod, Read and Cutler (1995). Some researchers (e.g.,Bothwell, Brigham and Pigott, 1987; Deffenbacher, 1980) have concluded that thepositive correlations between accuracy and confidence for testimony andidentification may be over-estimates, however, as they are more likely to haveobtained under optimal conditions of viewing, retention and recognition. Optimalviewing conditions involve factors such as good illumination at the time ofwitnessing the event, long and focused exposure of the target person(s), and theparticipant±witnesses's attention being directed at the incident from beginning toend. In addition, laboratory studies usually employ only a very short retentioninterval between witnessing and recall or identification tests.

The accuracy±confidence relationship may be affected by a number of factorsincluding situational factors (e.g., duration of event, retention interval),characteristics of the event to be remembered (e.g., violent or non-violent), theway accuracy is assessed (Brigham, 1988) and characteristics of the witness. Recentresearch has been directed to investigating a number of moderator variables thatmay increase the accuracy±confidence relationship (e.g., Weingardt et al., 1994). Thisresearch appears to have focused more on eyewitness identification accuracy than ontestimony accuracy. In Sporer's (1992) study, the correlation between identificationaccuracy and subjective confidence was significant when both the scores of choosers(i.e., those making correct or incorrect identifications) and non-choosers (i.e., thosemaking no choice) were used. This correlation was boosted further when scores ofchoosers only were correlated, a result supported by the Sporer et al. (1995) meta-analysis. Kassin (1985) and Kassin et al. (1991) found that accuracy and subjectiveconfidence were significantly correlated for participants who were maderetrospectively self-aware of their behaviour during the eyewitness task and for

44 J. Nolan and R. Markham

& 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Appl. Cognit. Psychol. 12: 43±54 (1998)

participants in high accountability conditions (who had to justify the rating made),but the correlation approached zero if neither of these conditions was present. Intheir studies, participants viewed their own videotaped performance after anidentification task and before giving a confidence judgment.Personality factors are another class of variables that have been studied as possible

moderators of the accuracy±confidence relationship. Using an identification task,Bothwell et al. (1987a) investigated the accuracy±confidence relationship for intro-version/extroversion, and neurotic/stable personality types. The accuracy±confidence correlation for introverts was 0.32, while that for extroverts was just0.03; the correlations for neurotics and stables were 0.38 and 0.04 respectively.Christiaansen, Ochalek and Sweeney (1984) studied accuracy±confidencerelationships for testimony in field-dependent versus field-independent personalitytypes and also in people differing in reported locus of control. No difference inaccuracy was found for the different personality types. A positive correlation wasobtained between confidence and accuracy, however, for the male field-independentparticipants. It was argued that due to their greater `self-awareness', field-independents were more competent at assessing confidence in their answers.Polans (1985) did not report correlations between confidence and accuracy ofreports for the repressors and sensitizers included in her study, but did find thatrepressors expressed higher confidence than sensitizers despite the fact that theytended to be less accurate. There is thus some evidence that subjective confidencejudgments and accuracy±confidence correlations may be affected by certainpersonality factors for both eyewitness testimony and identification. The presentstudy investigated the relationship between anxiety (specifically, test anxiety) andconfidence within groups of high and low anxious people in an eyewitness testimonysituation. Differences between these groups in overall accuracy and confidence werealso examined.The effect of anxiety at time of retrieving eyewitness information has received little

attention, although the impact of anxiety at time of questioning may have importantimplications. It is very likely that some witnesses may become much more anxiousthan others during police questioning, or cross-examination in court. They mayperceive the questioning situation as some kind of test, on which they might fail tosupply correct or appropriate information and thus be judged by themselves orothers as inadequate. This may be reflected in both their subjective and perceivedconfidence. It is less clear whether their anxious state at time of questioning shouldaffect the accuracy of their testimony. Most research on the effect of anxiety oneyewitness testimony has examined the effect at time of encoding and as a result ofmanipulation of some external event (e.g., Christianson and Loftus, 1987; Yuille andCutshall, 1986), and has usually reported a detrimental effect of high anxiety onmemory performance. An eyewitness study in which participants were selected onthe basis of scores on the Test Anxiety Scale (Sarason, 1972) found poorerperformance by highly anxious than low-anxious participants when all were givenego threatening instructions at time of both encoding and retrieval (Dobson andMarkham, 1993). Test anxiety refers to an individual's propensity to engage inself-preoccupied `worry' in an evaluative situation, reflecting a lack of confidencein her/his abilities, a heightened awareness of possible negative outcomes, and soon. Some of the questions that are included in test anxiety scales such as the TestAnxiety Scale (TAS) specifically ask about confidence during a testing procedure.

Accuracy, con®dence and anxiety 45


High-test-anxious people would therefore be expected to have lower overallconfidence in their answers to questions about a previously witnessed than wouldlow-test-anxious participants. High-test-anxious people are likely to evaluate, or`cognitively appraise', their own abilities more often and intensively than low testanxious people. A large component of `worry' involves thinking about theperformance and its possible outcome rather than thinking about the task itself, inthis instance, the task of attempting to recall what had been previously seen. Becauseindividual differences in this type of appraisal have been argued to be important inproducing correlations between accuracy and confidence (e.g., Christiaansen et al.,1984), the correlation between accuracy and confidence would be expected to besignificant for highly anxious participants but not for those of low levels of anxiety.Further, highly anxious participants would be expected to have less overallsubjective confidence than the low anxious.

As in previous studies of eyewitness testimony and identification (e.g., Kassin etal., 1991; Wells et al., 1981; Whitley and Greenberg, 1986), subjective confidence waspredicted to be positively correlated with perceived confidence, as a result of avariety of verbal and non-verbal cues indicating confidence that are displayed whendescribing people and events. If the subjective confidence of highly anxiousparticipants is correlated with the accuracy of their performance, as we predicted,then perceived confidence and the accuracy of performance for these participantsshould be significantly correlated; this correlation should not be significant for low-anxious participants. Overall, highly anxious participants should thus be perceivedby others as less confident than low-anxious participants.

METHOD

Participants

Thirty high-anxious (HA) and 30 low-anxious (LA) male and female first yearPsychology students served as participants. High-anxious (HA) participants werethose scoring 524 on the TAS (Sarason, 1972), and low-anxious (LA) participantswere those scoring 415, representing the upper and lower 16% of a pool of 187students. The male : female ratio across groups was not equal, but a balancing ofgender across anxiety groups was not thought necessary, as significant differenceshave almost never been reported in this literature.

Anxiety measurement

The TAS (Sarason, 1972) was employed as the instrument for selecting high- andlow-anxious subjects. This scale consists of 37 items, 35 of which concern `worry'. Asit is a frequently used scale with acceptable reliability and validity (e.g., Sarason,1972), it was considered the most appropriate for the test conditions used in thepresent experiment. Participants responded to the TAS 2±6 weeks prior to theeyewitness part of the study.

Materials and procedure

A 90-second video clip was presented to small groups of participants. The clipdepicted a hold-up in an Asian restaurant; six main characters were involved and a



number of other people were present. Three intruders entered and verbally abusedthree men who had been talking together in the restaurant. After a scuffle, theintruders were disarmed. Participants were told prior to viewing the videotape thatthey would be questioned about it in 1 week's time.The retention test consisted of 14 cued-recall questions, 7 of which were open-

ended (e.g., `Describe the build and clothing of the intruders as fully as possible') and7 of which required more specific answers (e.g., `Were any gunshots fired?'). Once anopen-ended question had been posed, participants were given no additional retrievalprompts. Participants were questioned individually and questions were presentedand answered verbally. The questions asked for descriptions of the people andobjects involved in the incident, the sequence of actions that took place, anddescriptions of the location of the events. The performance of each participant wasvideotaped. These recordings were rated later for perceived confidence. In order toincrease the degree of anxiety that the questioning situation might induce,participants were able to see their own performance concurrently on a televisionmonitor. We predicted that this procedure would be particularly effective inincreasing the anxiety of participants selected as highly anxious, who should be veryresponsive to such self-awareness cues, but should be less effective in increasinganxiety for low anxious participants, who should be more concerned with theirperformance on the target task and less concerned with analysing other aspects oftheir performance.After they made each point in answer to a question, participants were instructed to

indicate their confidence in the accuracy of that point by pressing one of the threebuttons located on the desk in front of them. Button 1 indicated `very confident'; 2indicated `moderately confident'; and 3 indicated `not at all confident'. This scale wasadopted rather than a scale with more choices, as a greater range of buttons may haveresulted in confusion. These responses were visible only to the experimenter and werenot recorded by the video camera. In order to verify that participants who scoredthemselves as highly anxious on the TAS were actually more anxious than LAparticipants at the time of questioning, all participants were asked to rate their degreeof anxiety on a scale of 1 (totally relaxed) to 7 (very anxious) at the end of the testingsession. This scale listed intermediate numbers without additional verbal descriptors.

Two experimentally blind observers (one male and one female) independentlywatched the video-recordings of all participants at the time of questioning. At thecompletion of the video of each participant's performance they rated how confidentthe person appeared overall on a 5-point scale, ranging from very confident(1) to notat all confident (5). The observers were unaware of the witnesses' own confidencejudgments. As only one judgment was made by each rater about the confidence ofeach participant, a wider range of ratings was adopted than for the individual answerratings made by participants.

RESULTS

Before the hypotheses of major interest were tested, it was necessary to confirm thatthe selection of the HA and LA participants from their scores on the TAS resulted ingroups differing in state anxiety. Participants selected as highly anxious on the TASstated that at the time of questioning they felt more anxious than those selected as



low anxious, t(58)=3.98, p50.001 (HA mean=4.27, sd=1.28, and LA mean=3.20,sd=0.96). It should be noted that although the HA group did not rate themselves asvery highly anxious, they responded that they were significantly more anxious thandid the LA group.

Participants were asked questions to which they responded correctly, incorrectly,or were free to state that they did not know the answer. If participants gavesubstantial descriptive detail of the event, the maximum possible score for the 14questions was 50 points. For example, the open-ended question `Describe the buildand clothing of the intruders as fully as possible' could result in a maximum of 8points, with 1 point given for each predetermined major descriptive component (e.g.,`wearing a balaclava'). If a relevant descriptive detail was given, it was classified aseither correct or incorrect. Participants only occasionally gave an `I don't know'response. Relevant details not mentioned were classified as omissions. It should benoted that participants mostly gave very incomplete descriptions when answering theopen-ended questions, with the mean scores below reflecting the numerousomissions. Accuracy was defined as the proportion of answers that were correct,and was calculated using the formula {Accuracy=[correct/correct+errors]}.Accuracy scores were a preferred measure of performance as they correct for thepossibility that some participants may give a large number of both correct andincorrect answers while others may give fewer answers, but those given may almostall be correct.

Subjective confidence was assessed by each participant at the time of giving eachrelevant detail in answer to a question on a scale ranging from 1 (very confident) to 3(not at all confident). Means and standard deviations for confidence are given inTable 1 below. Overall, as predicted, the HA participants expressed less confidencein their answers than LA participants, t(58)=2.82, p50.01. A mean confidencerating was obtained for each participant for correct answers and for errors separatelyin order to further examine this overall difference. HA participants expressed lessconfidence in their correct answers than LA participants, t(58)=2.68, p50.01.However, for answers that were incorrect, HA and LA participants did not differ intheir rated confidence, p40.05. Both HA and LA participants were a great dealmore confident in their correct answers than in their incorrect answers (t(29)=5.42,p50.01 for HA and t(29)=7.04, p50.01 for LA). Correlations were conducted



Table 1. Means and standard deviations for confidence, correct responses, errors, andaccuracy for HA and LA groups of participants

HA LA

Mean SD Mean SD

Mean confidence 1.96 0.44 1.69 0.27Mean conf.correct

1.87 0.47 1.61 0.26

Mean conf. inc. 2.31 0.41 2.16 0.43Perceived conf. 3.23 0.18 2.52 0.20Number correct 19.67 6.91 20.77 5.62Number errors 4.40 2.17 4.47 2.10Accuracy 0.80 0.11 0.82 0.10

across participants within each group between confidence in correct answers anderrors. For the HA participants, r(28)=0.47, p50.01. For LA participants,r(28)=0.37, p50.05.For perceived confidence, a significant interrater reliability coefficient was

obtained, r(58)=0.798 p50.001. HA participants were perceived as significantlyless confident than LA participants, t(58)=3.29, p50.001. It was predicted thatsubjective confidence would be positively correlated with perceived confidence forboth groups of participants. The obtained correlation coefficient was statisticallysignificant for both HA participants r(28)=0.442, p50.05, and LA participantsr(28)=0.473, p50.01.Correlations between accuracy and mean confidence were calculated for HA

and LA groups using both subjective and perceived confidence ratings. Aspredicted, subjective confidence was significantly correlated with accuracy in theHA group, r(28)=70.60, p50.001. Those HA participants who were moreaccurate (indicated by a higher score) were also more confident (as indicated bya lower score). For HA participants, number of correct responses correlatedsignificantly with confidence in those responses, r=70.562, p50.01, but numberof errors was not correlated significantly with confidence in those errors, r=0.21,p40.05. Subjective confidence was not significantly correlated with accuracy inthe LA group, r(28)=70.284, p40.1, as predicted. For LA participants, numberof correct responses was not correlated significantly with confidence in those correctresponses, r=0.10, p40.1, but number of effors was correlated significantlywith confidence, r=70.45, p50.05. It should be noted that for both groups thenumber of correct responses was far higher than the number of errors, sothe relationship between correct responses and confidence makes a much moresubstantial contribution to the accuracy±confidence correlation than does the error±confidence relationship. The mean of the confidence scores for the HA group wouldhave been affected by a number of outlying participants who obtained scoresindicating a very marked lack of confidence in their correct answers. Theseparticipants were also amongst those giving the lowest number of correct responses.The size of the correlation in the HA group between number of correct responses andconfidence, and accuracy and confidence would have been inflated by theseparticipants. Within the LA group's confidence scores, there were no outlyingparticipants.Perceived confidence was significantly correlated with accuracy in the HA group,

r(28)=70.54, p50.01. Hence, the more accurate HA participants were, the moreconfident they appeared. The outlying HA participants referred to above were notconsistently perceived as lacking confidence. A significant correlation betweenperceived confidence and accuracy was not obtained for the LA group,r(28)=70.221, p40.1. Thus, LA participants appearing more confident were notnecessarily more accurate.Predictions were not made about possible differences in recall

performance between the groups. However, it could have been interesting ifdifferences had been found. Scores for recall performance are presented in Table 1.Neither the differences between mean number of correct responses given by HA andLA participants nor the mean number of errors approached statistical significance.Mean accuracy scores for HA and LA participants did not differ significantly(p40.05).



DISCUSSION

One characteristic of highly test-anxious people is that they report generally havingless confidence in their performance in test situations than low-anxious people. Thus,it was expected that the highly anxious participants would express lower confidencein the accuracy of their answers in the eyewitness recall task than low-anxiousparticipants. Our results supported this contention, which is consistent with resultsobtained by Bothwell et al. (1987a) in an eyewitness identification task. They foundthat neurotics were significantly less confident of their decisions in a lineupidentification task than were stables. As anxiety is usually regarded as an importantcomponent of neuroticism, (e.g., Eysenck, 1977), the finding of a similar effect of testanxiety on confidence in an eyewitness recall task (in which a number of questionswere asked) was not unexpected. The effect of anxiety, as a relatively stablepersonality factor, on confidence in an eyewitness task thus appears to be fairlygeneral. It should be noted that there was a greater variance in confidence for HAthan LA participants in our study. Many HA people were as confident as LA people,but a number of HA people expressed markedly less confidence than any LA people.

High- and low-test-anxious participants are argued to approach the testingsituation in different ways, with HA people worrying to a much greater extent thanLA people about factors such as their current level of performance and the possibleoutcomes of it. Anxiety as a personality factor may have different effects fromanxiety resulting from some externally imposed event on an unselected group ofpeople. Threat may be seen to be involved in both internally and externally generatedanxiety, but the relative contributions to the anxiety±confidence relationship offactors such as worry about failure, emotionality (e.g., Liebert and Morris, 1967) andfear of physical harm are likely to differ. The present results, therefore, may notallow predictions about relationships between anxiety and confidence as a functionof factors such as violence of the viewed event (which should increase anxiety), orbriefing of the witness (which should reduce it).

The HA and LA participants did not differ in the accuracy of their responsesdespite the fact that HA participants rated themselves both in the TAS and at thetime of testing to be more test anxious than LA participants. Previous studies thathave examined the effect of anxiety on eyewitness performance have manipulatedanxiety at time of encoding of the event only (e.g., Christianson and Loftus, 1987;Yuille and Cutshall, 1986), or at time of both encoding and retrieval (Dobson andMarkham, 1993). In the present study, there was no evidence that there was an effectof test anxiety on accuracy when the anxiety was presumably minimal at time ofencoding and relatively high at time of recall.

The significant subjective accuracy±confidence correlation obtained for HAparticipants is consistent with the suggestion that HA participants, if they performeither well or poorly overall, may have some insight into this and express it in theirconfidence scores. Anxious people are likely to be more self-aware and thus assesstheir own performance more accurately than LA people. The procedure adopted inthe present study, in which all participants could view their own behaviourconcurrently on a video screen while being questioned, was expected to increase thelevel of self-awareness (Kassin, 1985; Kassin et al., 1991). The accuracy±confidencecorrelations for HA participants are consistent with this suggestion, while the lowcorrelation between accuracy and confidence for LA participants is consistent with



the suggestion that people who are low in anxiety have a reduced propensity for self-awareness. LA participants tended to be more confident in their performance andshowed less variability than HA participants, despite the fact that they were no moreaccurate. It was interesting that, overall, HA participants expressed less confidencein their correct responses than LA participants but not in their errors. Further, HAparticipants who gave fewer correct answers were less confident in these correctresponses than HA participants who gave more correct answers, but there was norelationship between number of errors and confidence in these. These relationshipswere reversed for LA participants. The error data are difficult to explain, althoughthe low number of errors made needs to be taken into account. The significantcorrelations between confidence in correct responses and errors for both HA and LAgroups of participants are interesting. Although the design of the present study is notappropriate for within-subjects correlations, correlations between confidence forcorrect and incorrect responses suggest that confidence may not necessarily be agood predictor of the correctness of any particular answer. However, thecorrelations between accuracy and confidence indicate that, for HA people, meanconfidence was related to the extent and reliability of their overall ability to recall thepreviously witnessed event. This does not seem to be the case for LA participants.The latter results are consistent with the suggestion that HA participants maderelatively realistic assessments of their memory for the event whereas LAparticipants did not necessarily do this. Results are also consistent with evidencefrom the eyewitness identification study reported by Bothwell et al. (1987a), whofound a stronger association between confidence and identification accuracy amongneurotics than among stables and among introverts than extroverts. Differences inanxiety may, in fact, partly account for these findings and may also help explainsome of the conflicting literature on the accuracy±confidence relationships for bothtestimony and identification. If studies have a larger proportion of LA participantsthan HA participants, then it is likely that no relationship between confidence andaccuracy will be obtained. In contrast, studies having a greater proportion of HAparticipants are much more likely to find that confidence is related to accuracy.Within the HA group, however, the scores of about a quarter of the participants mayhave been particularly important in contributing to the means, standard deviations,and correlations obtained. These participants rated themselves as markedly lackingconfidence, and most of the low numbers of correct answers in the study came fromthis subgroup. These participants thus correctly assessed their overall lack of abilityto remember correctly. It would be interesting in the future to attempt to identifypossible differentiating characteristics of these HA people, as they did not differfrom other HA people in their scores on the TAS.It was predicted that perceived confidence would be correlated with subjective

confidence and this was found to be the case for both HA and LA participants. Aswith subjective confidence, highly anxious participants were perceived to be lessconfident than low-anxious participants. Judgments of confidence about others havebeen argued to be based on both verbal and nonverbal cues (e.g., Kassin et al., 1991;Leippe et al., 1992). The cues on which judgments of low confidence are madeinclude verbal hedges, hesitations, memory failure admissions, voice tremor, facialexpressions and posture shifts. A number of these are also cues exhibited by anxiouspeople, so it was not surprising that people judged to be low in perceived confidenceshould also be those who were test anxious, despite the fact that the TAS asks few



questions about these types of behaviour patterns. The significant interraterreliability coefficient for perceived confidence suggests that observers can reliablydifferentiate between high- and low-confident participants.

The finding that both subjective and perceived confidence were significantly lowerfor HA participants than for LA participants is important from the point of view ofthe justice system. If jurors assume that confidence reflects accuracy of eyewitnesstestimony, as a number of studies suggest is the case, (e.g., Leippe et al., 1992;Lindsay et al., 1989; Whitley and Greenberg, 1986), then they may give less credenceto the overall reports given by HA witnesses than LA witnesses, despite the fact thatboth groups may be equally likely to be correct. Further, the finding that bothsubjective and perceived confidence were significantly correlated with accuracy forHA participants but not for LA participants may have important implications in theforensic setting. This result contrasts with the widely held belief, discussedpreviously, that there is little relationship between confidence and accuracy.Further, the result was obtained when conditions might be considered not fullyoptimal, as there was some delay between viewing of the event and questioning(Deffenbacher, 1980) and the event was presented by video and not under realisticcircumstances. The argument that significant correlations result when optimalviewing and retrieval conditions hold is probably not applicable, especially as thesignificant correlation was found for HA participants only. In generalizing tosituations outside the laboratory, it may be important to note that confidence andaccuracy are much more strongly related in people who score highly on a test-anxietyscale than those who score low. On the other hand, if errors are of particularconcern, then test-anxiety scores may not be the appropriate predictor of therelationship between confidence and whether a particular item is in error.

In conclusion, the present study has suggested that test anxiety may act as amodifier of the accuracy±confidence relationship in the eyewitness questioningsituation, consistent with relationships found between neuroticism, accuracy andconfidence for eyewitness identification tasks (Bothwell et al., 1987a). Anxiety attime of encoding of the event was not a focus of interest in the present study,although it is recognized that in the real world situation anxiety would be present attime of encoding for most eyewitness events about which people are later questioned.Although the video used in this study portrayed a criminal event, it would not initself have been very stressful and the instructions given to participants were not ego-threatening. Studies demonstrating the role of anxiety at time of encoding (e.g.,Christianson and Loftus, 1987; Yuille and Cutshall, 1986) or at encoding andretrieval (e.g., Dobson and Markham, 1993) in reducing the accuracy of testimonysuggest that it may be fruitful to examine the relationships between confidence andaccuracy when anxiety is aroused at both time of encoding and retrieval. It may wellbe the case that, under these circumstances, the effect of anxiety as a modifier of theaccuracy±confidence relationship differs from that obtained in the present study.

REFERENCES

Bothwell, R. K., Brigham, J. C. and Pigott, M. A. (1987a). An exploratory study ofpersonality di�erences in eyewitness memory. Journal of Social Behavior and Personality, 2,335±343.



Bothwell, R. K., De�enbacher, K. A. and Brigham, J. C. (1987b). Correlation of eyewitnessaccuracy and con®dence: optimality hypothesis revisited. Journal of Applied Psychology, 72,691±695.

Brigham, J. C. (1988). Is witness con®dence helpful in judging eyewitness accuracy? In M. M.Gruneberg, P. E. Morris and R. N. Sykes (Eds.), Practical aspects of memory: CurrentResearch and Issues, Vol. 1. Chichester: John Wiley.

Christiaansen, R. E., Ochalek, K. and Sweeney, J. D. (1984). Individual di�erences ineyewitness memory and con®dence judgments. The Journal of General Psychology, 110,47±52.

Christianson, S. A. and Loftus, E. F. (1987). Memory for traumatic events. Applied CognitivePsychology, 1, 225±239.

Cli�ord, B. R. and Hollin, C. (1981). E�ects of type of incident and the number ofperpetrators on eyewitness memory. Journal of Applied Psychology, 66, 364±370.

Cli�ord, B. R. and Scott, J. (1978). Individual and situational factors in eyewitness testimony.Journal of Applied Psychology, 63, 352±359.

Cutler, B., Penrod, S. D. and Stuve, T. E. (1988). Juror decision making in eyewitnessidenti®cation cases. Law and Human Behavior, 12, 41±55.

Cutler, B., Penrod, S. D. and Dexter, H. R. (1990). Juror sensitivity to eyewitnessidenti®cation evidence. Law and Human Behavior, 14, 185±191.

De�enbacher, K. A. (1980). Eyewitness accuracy and con®dence: Can we infer anything abouttheir relationship? Law and Human Behavior, 4, 243±260.

De�enbecher, K. A. and Loftus, E. F. (1982). Do jurors share a common understandingconcerning eyewitness behaviour? Law and Human Behavior, 6, 15±30.

De�enbacher, K. A., Brown, E. L. and Sturgill, W. (1978). Some predictors of eyewitnessmemory accuracy. In M. M. Gruneberg, P. E. Morris and R. N. Sykes (Eds.), PracticalAspects of Memory. London: Academic Press.

Dobson, M. and Markham, R. (1993). Individual di�erences in anxiety and eyewitnessmemory. The Journal of General Psychology, 119, 343±350.

Eysenck, M. (1977). Human memory: theory, research and individual di�erences. Oxford:Pergamon Press.

Kassin, S. M. (1985). Eyewitness identi®cation: retrospective self-awareness and the accuracy±con®dence correlation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 49, 878±893.

Kassin, S. M., Rigby, S. and Castillo, S. R. (1991). The accuracy±con®dence correlation ineyewitness testimony: limits and extensions of the retrospective self-awareness e�ect.Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61, 698±707.

Leippe, M. R., Wells, G. L. and Ostrom, T. M. (1978). Crime seriousness as a determinent ofaccuracy in eyewitness identi®cation. Journal of Applied Psychology, 63, 345±351.

Leippe, M. R., Manion, A. P. and Romanczyk, A. (1992). Eyewitness persuasion: how andhow well do fact ®nders judge the accuracy of adults' and children's memory reports?Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63, 181±197.

Liebert, R. M. and Morris, L. W. (1967). Cognitive and emotional components of test anxiety:a distinction and some initial data. Psychological Reports, 20, 975±978.

Lindsay, R. C., Wells, G. L. and O'Connor, F. J. (1989). Mock-juror beliefs of accurate andinaccurate eyewitnesses: a replication and extension. Law and Human Behavior, 13, 333±339.

Loftus, E. F. (1974). Reconstructing memory: the incredible witness. Psychology Today, 8,116±119.

Murray, D. M. and Wells, G. L. (1982). Does knowledge that a crime was staged a�ectaccuracy? Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 12, 42±53.

Polans, A. R. (1985). The e�ects of repression-sensitization classi®cation and stress oneyewitness recall. Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, 23, 181±184.

Sarason, I. G. (1972). Experimental approaches to test anxiety: attention and the uses ofinformation. In C. D. Spielberger (Ed.), Anxiety: Current trends in theory and research,Vol. 2. New York: Academic Press.

Smith, V. L., Kassin, S. M. and Ellsworth, P. C. (1989). Eyewitness accuracy and con®dence:within- versus between-subjects correlations. Journal of Applied Psychology, 74, 356±359.

Sporer, S. L. (1992). Post-dicting eyewitness accuracy: con®dence, decision times and persondescriptions of choosers and nonchoosers. European Journal of Social Psychology, 22, 157±180.



Sporer, S. L. (1993). Eyewitness identi®cation accuracy, con®dence, and decision times insimultaneous and sequential lineups. Journal of Applied Psychology, 78, 22±33.

Sporer, S. L., Penrod, S., Read, D. and Cutler, B. (1995). Choosing, con®dence, and accuracy:a meta-analysis of the con®dence±accuracy relation in eyewitness identi®cation studies.Psychological Bulletin, 118, 315±327.

Weingardt, K. R., Leonesio, R. J. and Loftus, E. F. (1994). Viewing eyewitness research froma metacognitive perspective. In J. Metcalfe and A. P. Shimamura (Eds.), Metacognition.London: The MIT Press.

Wells, G. L. and Turtle, J. W. (1987). Eyewitness testimony research: current knowledge andemergent controversies. Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science, 19, 363±388.

Wells, G. L., Ferguson, T. J. and Lindsay, C. L. (1981). The tractability of eyewitnesscon®dence and its implications for triers of fact. Journal of Applied Psychology, 66, 688±696.

Wells, G. L., Lindsay, G. L. and Ferguson, T. J. (1979). Accuracy, con®dence, and jurorperceptions in eyewitness identi®cation. Journal of Applied Psychology, 64, 440±448.

Whitley, B. E. and Greenberg, M. S. (1986). The role of eyewitness con®dence in jurorperceptions of credibility. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 16, 387±409.

Wrightsman, L. S. (1991). Psychology and the Legal System (2ndEd.). California: ColePublishing Co.

Yarmey, A. D. (1993). Adult age and gender di�erences in eyewitnesses recall in ®eld settings.Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 23, 1921±1932.

Yuille, J. C. and Cutshall, J. L. (1986). A study of eyewitness memory of a crime. Journal ofApplied Psychology, 71, 291±301.



The accuracy–confidence relationship in an eyewitness task: anxiety as a modifier

Documents

Transcript of The accuracy–confidence relationship in an eyewitness task: anxiety as a modifier