Both lecture delivery and Facebook use are ubiquitous aspects of higher education from staff and student points-of-view, respectively. An attempt was made to integrate the two by setting up a Facebook group and delivering contemporary news stories in preparation for in-lecture discussion in a large-scale (1,200 students across 5 sections) Introduction to Psychology class. Each section experienced two-thirds of the class with Facebook intervention and one-third without, thereby each section served as its own control group. Overall, Facebook intervention did not yield higher self-report of course engagement or understanding for those portions of the course. Only those individuals who never viewed the Facebook postings reported lower engagement and understanding of the in-lecture discussion, in addition to a lower appreciation of the link between the Facebook content and the lecture material. Our data suggest that successful integration of social media into the classroom is a challenging one and the relative success or failure of these interventions may stand or fall on the basis of a complex interaction between a number of factors including the timing of content delivery, the integration of social media content with course assessment and the students’ own perspective on using social media for academic purposes.

Like Hugo Munsterberg, we believe that psychological science can inform the courts and police regarding eyewitness evidence. But 100 years into the enterprise, the body of knowledge acquired to date demands considerable circumspection, both in the claims expert psychological witnesses make in court and in the recommendations psychologists tender to investigating officers. There are a number of points regarding eyewitness evidence that psychologists can offer with considerable confidence, but many matters are as yet open to debate (and some issues are likely to remain unsettled for a long time). We encourage researchers, law enforcement and the legal community to (a) identify and prioritize the problems to be solved, (b) focus on a more integrative empirical approach, including more of the field experiments currently in use, as well as new descriptive research, especially on base rates and (c) use basic psychological theory and principles to consolidate the wide range of phenomena present in individual cases. Copyright (C) 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Psychologists have conducted extensive research and devoted substantial thought to the memory, cognition, decision-making, logic, and human interaction components of eyewitness evidence. It is fortunate that much of that work has been formally recognized by law enforcement and the legal community and used as the basis for procedure and policy changes with regard to how eyewitness evidence is collected and evaluated. The authors discuss reasons that some segments of law enforcement, the legal community, and the public resist these research findings (e.g., by seeing psychology's role as a way to discredit eyewitness evidence or being committed to established procedures that have no empirical support). The authors also address gaps between these common misconceptions and what the psychology research perspective has to offer, in an effort to gain even more support for research- and logic-based recommendations concerning eyewitness evidence.

ABSTRACT This article provides practice recommendations for collecting and preserving evidence using eyewitness identification procedures. Suggested procedures are based on decades of social science research as well as the recommended practices found in the recent report on the Robert Sophonow case in Manitoba and in a 1999 U.S. National Institute of Justice document distributed to all police services in the U.S. These recommendations currently guide training programs for several police services in Canada, the U.S., and around the world, and experienced criminal investigators will recognize many of the procedures as practices they have employed in their own cases. The overarching goal of this article is to accumulate these recommendations in one place in order to allow investigators to take advantage of them and achieve a maximal level of accurate eyewitness identifications while minimizing the rate of inaccurate choices. Criminal investigators know that it often takes many pieces of converging evidence to solve a complex case. Freshly-schooled recruits and veteran investigators alike are trained to search for, detect, collect, and preserve obvious physical evidence such as weapons and stolen property, as well as trace physical evidence such as fibres, hairs, fingerprints, blood, and semen. Few police officers, lawyers, scientists, or people in general, would question the importance of using the best procedures available to obtain and preserve such evidence, not to mention adherence to relevant statutory and case law. Eyewitness evidence (i.e., the testimony of victims, witnesses, and suspects, and perhaps the identification of a suspect from a live or photograph line-up), however, presents some unique problems to investigators, which in turn can lead to especially serious consequences in court. An analysis of actual cases in the U.S. reveals that the mistaken identification of the wrong person by victims and witnesses to a crime is the single most common error leading to the arrest and conviction of innocent people (U.S. National Institute of Justice, 1996). Several cases in Canada suggest similar problems here (e.g., Regina v. McGuiness, Ballantyne & Ballantyne, 1997; Regina v. Sophonow, 1985). In addition, potentially valuable eyewitness information is sometimes overlooked by not employing optimal procedures. In either case, the result is that the actual perpetrator of the crime is still at large, either because the wrong person has been identified or because no evidence has been produced. This article describes a set of recommendations designed to minimize the rate of eyewitness errors, while at the same time maximizing the rate of accurate identifications. The recommendations are supported by over 20 years of research, are consistent with the U.S. Guide for Law Enforcement on Eyewitness Evidence (U.S. National Institute of Justice, 1999), are the basis of training curricula for several police services in Canada and the U.S. (e.g., Ottawa-Carleton, York Region, New Jersey), and are in use by thousands of police officers in Canada and around the world (see e.g., Kebbell, 2000 for a favourable comparison between practices in the United Kingdom and these recommendations). It is hoped that the presentation of these recommendations, along with their scientific rationale, will aid in the effectiveness of investigative practices as well as the development of formalized policing procedures regarding eyewitness evidence (for similar discussions on this issue see e.g., Levi & Lindsey, 2001; Lindsey, 1999; Wells, 2001; Wells, Small, Penrod, Malpass, Fulero & Brimacombe, 1998). A Psychological Assessment of the Eyewitness Evidence Predicament It is certainly not a groundbreaking statement to say that memory is not perfect. Anyone who has forgotten a name, misplaced their car keys, or scored less than 100% on an exam knows that not everything people initially perceive can be recalled accurately at a later date. …

The U.S. Department of Justice released the first national guide for collecting and preserving eyewitness evidence in October 1999. Scientific psychology played a large role in making a case for these procedural guidelines as well as in setting a scientific foundation for the guidelines, and eyewitness researchers directly participated in writing them. The authors describe how eyewitness researchers shaped understanding of eyewitness evidence issues over a long period of time through research and theory on system variables. Additional pressure for guidelines was applied by psychologists through expert testimony that focused on deficiencies in the procedures used to collect the eyewitness evidence. DNA exoneration cases were particularly important in leading U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno to notice the eyewitness literature in psychology and to order the National Institute of Justice to coordinate the development of national guidelines. The authors describe their experience as members of the working group, which included prosecutors, defense lawyers, and law enforcement officers from across the country.

Two studies examined perceptions of child and adult eyewitnesses' credibility. In Study 1, college students evaluated transcribed testimonies of 8-year-old and adult witnesses to a videotaped staged crime. Half were misinformed about the witness's age (i.e., either believing a child's testimony was provided by an adult or vice versa). Neither actual age nor ostensible age affected participants' evaluations. In Study 2, adults (N= 85) viewed videotaped testimonies of 8-year-old, 12-year-old, and adult eyewitnesses. Half viewed 1 witness's testimony and then evaluated his or her credibility. The others viewed only a still frame of 1 witness, then imagined the testimony the witness had provided, and finally evaluated his or her credibility without having actually heard the testimony. Young children were judged more favorably when their entire testimony, rather than a still frame, was viewed. This was not true for the older eyewitnesses.

In 2 experiments, the effects on participants' memory and confidence of repeatedly describing a videotaped crime and of the opportunity to review a previous description were investigated. E. Scrivner and M. A. Safer (1988) demonstrated that witnesses' successive attempts to describe such events can lead to the recall of more new information in comparison with the amount forgotten (i.e., increased net recall, or hypermnesia). In Experiment 1, a more forensically relevant procedure was used, and no support for hypermnesia was found. Witnesses did recall significantly more new information across attempts, but the amount did not exceed how much was forgotten (i.e., increased gross recall, or reminiscence). The opportunity to review a previous statement had no effect on the number of items recalled. In Experiment 2, the more traditional, repeated-recall procedure used by Scrivner and Safer was applied, and their finding of hypermnesia was replicated with the present study's materials.

Psychological research on eyewitness testimony has flourished over the last decade and there are now a number of findings that appear relevant to police and courts. We review some of the major eyewitness research findings regarding such things as the relationship between accuracy and confidence, the identification of perpetrators from lineups, and the influence of misleading information on eyewitness memory and reports. Next, we discuss a controversy over the application of eyewitness research in the courtroom, namely expert testimony. The debate regarding expert testimony has sharpened researchers' conceptions of generalization problems and the quality of jurors' knowledge about eyewitness accuracy, as well as raising concerns about the proper role of experimental psychologists in the legal system. We propose that the confusion and controversy over expert testimony stems largely from the fact that expert testimony represents an attempt to provide services to the judicial phase, rather than the evidence-production phase, of the fact-finding process.

Scenarios with dramatic outcomes often evoke counterfactual thinking, mentally undoing that outcome by mutating events in the causal scenario and thereby allowing for the mental simulation of new outcomes. Is Experiment 1, we manipulated the order of four events in a scenario. Each of these events could be mutated to alter the outcome, and each event was described as having caused the eveni that followed it People preferred to change the first event and showed no preference for changes to the subsequent events. We proposed that perceived mutability of an event is constrained by the existence of prior events that are believed to have caused the event. Experiment 2 examined characteristics of the events themselves, rather than their order, that affect their mutability. When these were framed as a norm, people were relatively unlikely to mutate the event in order to undo the outcome, instead preferring to mutate the exceptions. The norm or exception status of other events in the scenario did not affect the mutability of a focal event. Discussion includes the conditions that naturally trigger counterfactual thinking and the role of counterfactual thinking in affective reactions.