Gender and Confidence Differences in Eyewitness Testimonies Taylor Schoenborn Minnesota State University Moorhead

Background Eyewitness testimonies are used all the time at court Juries are heavily influenced by eyewitness testimonies Study that suggests that one in three eyewitnesses will make a wrong identification (Safer et al, 2016) Robbery, hit and run, photo lineup The more confident the person giving the eyewitness testimony, the more believable they are.

Why is this important Finding if gender influences eyewitness testimonies and if there is a confidence difference Educating jurors Reducing wrongful convictions

What research has told us Old studies have mixed results, saying gender doesn’t influence eyewitness testimonies (Loftus et al, 1987) More recent studies have shown that females outperform males in most memory tasks (Areh, 2010) When asked to predict how well participants would do on a memory task, they were found to be overconfident. Meta analysis of 81 studies showed 55.6% favored females, 39.5% showed no difference and the rest favored males. In spatial memory, they looked at 26 studies, 13 favored males, 9 showed no difference and 4 favored females. More recent review shows that females outperform males in most memory tasks including facial recognition, recalling everyday tasks, stories, names and episodic memory. Gender bias Females remember female oriented/ neutral items better while males remember male oriented items better.

Experiment Will look at gender differences and confidence levels Will also look to see if there is an interaction between gender and confidence levels

Design Participants will watch a short video of a robbery taking place Participants will be asked to complete a filler task (short math worksheet) Participants will be asked to complete a questionnaire

Expected results If females remember more accurate details, they should have more accurate eyewitness statements and we should take them more serious. Obviously this changes from person to person. Since males are more confident in their answers this creates a problem in the court setting with their eyewitness testimonies being more believable even though research has told us that females will produce more accurate results.

Conclusions Number of correct details remembered and how confident participants are in there answers will be collected. The means and standard deviations will be compared to each other Chi squared and post hoc tests will be used to gather inferential statistics

Questions?