Cross-racial Eyewitness Identification

The own-race advantage (ORA) occurs when cross-race faces are more difficult to accurately identify than own-race faces. This robust phenomenon raises the alarm to legal justice system when eyewitnesses are required to identify cross-race targets. Although considerable amount of research effort has been put on ways to improve the identification accuracy through the use of lineup procedures, not much advancement in identification accuracy and confidence reliability has been reached. Eyewitness researchers once proposed an alternative procedure, sequential lineup, but the recommendation is not fully supported by empirical evidence in meta-analytic review. The superiority of sequential lineup only shows its validity under certain conditions, and more importantly, the psychological mechanism involved in its superiority is underdeveloped. The present research aims at finding the best lineup procedure in cross-racial eyewitness identification.