Effects Of Eyewitnesses

Whenever a crime occurs, an eyewitness plays a crucial role in helping police find and apprehend the perpetrator. Therefore, it is essential that eyewitnesses to crimes pay attention to the appearance of the perpetrator in order to identify them. However, false identifications by eyewitnesses have contributed to many wrongful convictions of innocent people and a main cause of this is an eyewitnesses’ inability to attend to the perpetrator due to the presence of a threatening stimuli, such as a weapon. When a crime occurs and the perpetrator has a weapon, eyewitnesses tend to focus mainly on the weapon rather than on the offender’s face or other external features. Previous research has shown that an individual uses their attentional capacity
Some researchers have found that stress and anxiety from the presence of the weapon causes individuals to focus more on the weapon (Pickel et al., 2006). Other researchers have found that the presence of the weapon creates a novelty effect in which individuals use more attentional capacity to attend to the weapon since it is unusual to the certain environment that are in and they have less attentional capacity available to attend to the perpetrator’s face (Hope & wright, 2007). The weapon focus effect raises many concerns because since attention is directed towards the weapon, eyewitnesses cannot devote necessary attention to concentrate on the perpetrators face. Since eyewitnesses do not exactly expect that they are going to observe a crime occur, perhaps they could be educated on how to be accurate eyewitness. Training people about the weapon focus effect could potentially decrease their ability to focus on the weapon and increase their ability to focus on the details of the perpetrator. As a result, this could possibly reduce the amount of false identifications from eyewitnesses and thereby enhance an individual’s accuracy of memorizing important details of a crime. Would the implementation of programs that teach people about the weapon-focus effect enhance their ability to focus on the perpetrator rather than the weapon and therefore increase eye-witness
In their first experiment, the researchers gathered witnesses in a classroom in which a fake crime was going to occur in. They taught some witnesses about the weapon focus effect and told them to avoid looking at the weapon and direct their attention towards memorizing the perpetrator’s physical features. The other eyewitnesses were not told anything about the weapon focus effect. All of the witnesses observed an actor, posing as a student, enter the room and they were holding either a textbook or a weapon. Witnesses who were not informed of the weapon-focus effect were more likely to recall details of the perpetrator when he was holding a book than when he was holding a weapon. Witnesses who were told about the weapon-focus effect were able to recall details about the perpetrator when he was holding either a weapon or a book. These findings suggest that weapons do not automatically capture attention when a crime occurs because individuals can be informed of the weapon and effect and taught to direct their attention away from the weapon (Pickel et al,