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The U.S. Supreme Court, state courts, and social science researchers have stated that showup identifications (one-person identifications) are less reliable than lineup identifications. Moreover, 74 % of eyewitness experts endorsed false identifications as more likely to occur from showups than lineups. Examination of the extant literature and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analyses of over 7500 participants confirm that showups are an inferior procedure to lineups. This conclusion holds true even in situations where showups should have a memorial advantage (e.g., at a short retention interval, a clothing match between encoding and test). A signal-detection-based diagnostic-feature model provides a theoretical explanation for why showups produce inferior eyewitness performance. The data also reveal that confidence is better related to accuracy for lineups than for showups. Unless new procedural …