Choice blindness : susceptibility to manipulation in eyewitness identification decisions and individual differences

Abstract

Reliability of eyewitness identification, if unchecked, can jeopardize police crime investigation and convictions by the courts. One of the issues affecting the reliability of eyewitness identification is choice blindness. This refers to a phenomenon where participants, upon making a face recognition decision, may fail to detect a blatant change to their original stimulus choice when being presented with an alternative stimulus. While choice blindness was first demonstrated with face recognition decisions, it can be demonstrated in other stimulus domains. Still, the underlying mechanisms of choice blindness, and in particular, the possible factors that may predict an individuals’ susceptibility to choice blindness are unclear. Here, we aimed to index individual sensitivity to choice blindness in a cohort of Chinese/Hong Kong participants and to examine whether sensitivity to choice blindness is predicted by four factors: identification accuracy, confidence rating, cognitive reflection ability and working memory capacity. We found no correlation between choice blindness sensitivity and these four factors, although we tentatively speculate that this may not truly reflect a lack of relationships, but rather perhaps a consequence of our particular task and design choices. We speculate that there could be other predictors of choice blindness, such as mood of the eyewitnesses and the ethnicity of the perpetrator and the eyewitnesses, that may be worth studying in the future.