View article

A review is made of issues and data on eyewitness identifications, and a relative‐judgment conceptualization is proposed. It is argued that eyewitnesses are prone to choose the lineup member who most resembles the perpetrator relative to other lineup members as evidenced by studies that manipulated similarity of lineup members. The relative‐judgment strategy is fallacious because of the unpredictable occurrence of target‐absent lineups and is not corrected fully by instructions to eyewitnesses. An extension of the relative‐judgment conceptualization proposes an inverse relationship between the goodness of witnesses' memories (quality and quantity of relevant information available in memory) and witnesses' tendencies to rely on relative judgments. This extended conceptualization was used to derive expectations regarding an experiment (N= 192 eyewitnesses) that used a blank lineup prior to presenting …