ABSTRACT
The issue we address is central to understanding our memories and when we can trust them: How confident can we be in our memories for past events? Might we be confident that our recollections are accurate but be totally wrong? This issue of confidence in our memories is critical to understanding who we are-we define ourselves in many ways by memories of our past experiences-and is also central to legal issues such as when eyewitness testimony should be used in court. Only confident witnesses make it to court. If a witness were to say, while viewing a line-up of suspects, “I’m not really sure this is the guy who robbed the store but it might be,” the case would never go to trial if the witmess did not become more confident over time. Unfortunately, however, some witnesses who are unconfident on an initial assessment do become more confident over time and with repeated testing. This is especially so when witnesses receive confirming feedback on an erroneous choice, such as “Good. You got the right guy” (Wells & Bradfield, 1998). This post-identification feedback effect has been replicated under various conditions and may be one reason low-confidence identifications rise in confidence over time (see Wells, Memon, & Penrod, 2006, pp. 66-67). This rise in confidence over time is one reason innocent people are sometimes convicted; a witness with wobbly confidence about his or her memory in an initial interview may become certain by the time the case reaches trial (especially when the interview is suggestive; Wells & Quinlivan, 2009; Wixted, Mickes, Clark, Gronlund, & Roediger, 2014).
