In a study of 19,732 participants, researchers played a mock-crime video depicting a white male stealing a laptop computer, and then presented a photograph of one suspect--either the perpetrator or an innocent suspect--alongside photographs of five police-lineup fillers who matched a basic description of the perpetrator but varied in how much they otherwise facially resembled him; using fillers who were more facially dissimilar from the suspect increased the likelihood of correctly identifying the perpetrator without increasing the likelihood of wrongly identifying the innocent suspect, according to the authors.
###
Article #20-17292: "Optimizing the selection of fillers in police lineups," by Melissa F. Collof, Brent M. Wilson, Travis M. Seale-Carlisle, and John T. Wixted.
MEDIA CONTACT: John T. Wixted, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA; tel: 858-705-3115; email: < jwixted@ucsd.edu >
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences