Lineup Construction and Evaluation
Put together a lineup. Read the eyewitness guide for information on how to put together a lineup.
Go here: http://www.dc.state.fl.us/AppCommon/
Choose a guy (search on some characteristics, or a name).
Then find fillers to match
Copy and paste into a word document
Print.
Show to friends, collect data according to instructions provided in the below link.
Read: http://eyewitness.utep.edu/consult05B.html
Calculate lineup bias: http://eyewitness.utep.edu/documents/bias-calc.xls
Write about your experience and findings here.
This was a fun topical blog to do. When I started creating my line-ups I thought it would be pretty easy. After about fifteen minutes working on it I realized it was pretty tough to find good fillers for your suspect. When you are only given a portion of people to choose from it is time consuming to find fillers that won’t create a biased line- up.
Since I wasn’t sure if I was doing it right I decided to make two separate line-ups. The first one I created included white males and my second line-up included white females. I found that the female line-up was the most difficult mainly because I was not given a large selection to choose as my fillers. There are definitely less women in the Florida prisons and I had to try matching them to my suspect making it even more challenging.
It was difficult choosing one person to use as a suspect. I started off typing in names of people I knew but I always got zero results. Then I ended up typing in only the last names of people I knew and had a little better luck. However, I didn’t actually end up using any of these people because I resorted to typing in a random set of physical characteristics and going off of that. I used very generic types of people. I think it would have been interesting to create a line-up with some unique looking individuals but decided I would have an even harder time with that line-up. My first line-up was of white males, 21-26 years old, brown hair, green eyes, 160-200 pounds, and 5’11 to 6’4 in height. I was given a good amount of people using this description. For fun, I also but a filter on so that I was only shown people who were charged with murder. That is where I found my suspect. My second line-up included white females, 30-36 years old, blonde hair, round face, skinny eyebrows, small nose, 140-160 pounds, and 5’4-5’8 in height. I was given approximately 20 women to choose from so my options were limited. I chose my suspect by looking at the 20 women as a whole. I used a different approach to choosing a suspect in this line-up. First I pinpointed a few characteristics that were noticeably similar in most of the women such as a round face, and small nose. From there I just picked one of the women that fit this description.
While I was showing the line-up a noticed a few more benefits to having two line-ups. The men’s line-up had fewer characteristics to go off of than the women’s line-up so I could analyze whether or not this had an effect on the mock witnesses. Secondly, by having a line-up of both genders I could ask mock witnesses whether or not it was easier when the line-up was a women or a man. One other variable that I manipulated in the men’s line-up was whether or not I mentioned the characteristic of green eyes. All of the individuals had green eyes according to their records; however, one suspect had green eyes that stuck out more than the others. This man was not my suspect. I found that when I mentioned green eyes to the mock-witness they all picked him. After noticing this I decided to leave out the green eyes part and start over seeing if this made a difference, which it did. Finally, I decided that instead of printing out the line-ups I showed them to the mock witnesses on my computer. I thought this would make it easier to see the hair color or eye color of the individuals in the line-up.
Although my line-ups were different they both got around the same scores on the line-up bias test. I will discuss the specific scores for my line-up of women. I had 24 mock-witnesses. 4 of these witnesses chose the suspect on the first try. There were a total of 6 people in the line-up. The probability of getting these results is .213865 which falls within the 5% and 1% confidence intervals. The Critical Ration ended up being 0 which also falls between the chance probability of .05 and .01. All in all, the results of this spreadsheet show that my line-up was not biased!
When I first started this assignment I thought it would be super easy to get a lineup that wasn't biased. I figured I could complete my lineup in about 10 or 15 minutes. I was wrong! It is definitely more difficult to create an unbiased lineup than I thought. I thought it was pretty hard, and I got to make up my suspect so it just makes me wonder how difficult it would be for police who have to find fillers for a suspect already in custody.
The first search I did was extremely too vague. I forgot to put in height or an eye color, so the results were not close to each other at all. The results varied too much to create an unbiased lineup. After this I attempted trying to find my suspect based on last names. I probably tried three or four different last names of people I know, but I couldn't find a suspect that fit the description I was going for. I tried this because I thought it would be interesting to see if anyone I knew or heard of would come up, but they didn't. This is when I took a break and decided to come up with a description of a suspect I thought would be easy to find five other fillers for. This is what I came up with: A male who was in his mid twenties (24-26), average height (5'8''-6'1''), between 170 pounds and 200 pounds, hazel eyes, brown hair that was really short and buzzed, and he had a narrow chin. I chose about four of the characteristics and put them into the search engine. I started sorting through the results, and then I finally found my supposed suspect. Once I decided what man was going to be the suspect the rest came really easy. I think since my characteristics I choose were very general that it helped the search go faster. I know this would not always be the case in actual lineups, and they might have to find specific characteristics in people. For example, tatoos or birthmarks that might resemble each other. Anyway, after I completed my lineup I was pretty confident that it was not biased. The men I chose all looked quite a bit a like.
I printed it off to show people. I didn't put the characteristics of the suspect on the paper becaue the reading said to describe the person before showing the mock witnesses the lineup because otherwise they will be searching for those features in the face. I asked 16 people, some were male and some were female. I noticed some similarities between the choices of the mock witnesses. One was that the mock witnesses that were women often chose the meanest looking guy out of the lineup. This was not the suspect. The majority of them told me they look too familiar, I don't know who to choose. When I asked the men to choose the suspect, they seemed to take more time and to study the lineup. The men were the only ones to guess the correct suspect. I don't know if it is because they noticed the characteristics better since they are men themselves or if they were just good at guessing.
This brings me to my results. Of the 16 mock witnesses I showed the lineup to, only 3 of them guessed my suspect. I think this proves my lineup was definitely unbiased, but it makes me wonder if I made it too difficult. I descibed the suspect in the same way to every mock witness to make sure my results were accurate. I described the man exactly like this: "I am going to show you a lineup of 6 men, and I need you to pick the man you think fits this description. He is an average size man who is between 5 feet 8 inches and 6 feet 1 inch tall, weighs around 180 pounds, and has hazel eyes. He has a narrow chin, a buzzed haircut, and brown hair. Can you find him?" The exact probability of my results were 0.242314. My chance expectation was .167 and the critical ratio of diff from chance was .214. I think these results are good because they were in between the 1% confident levels. Although I am not positive, I believe my results turned out good, and I created an unibiased lineup!
This assignment proved to be very interesting snd challenging. I chose to do a female line up just to shake it up. I started off searching for Africa-American women between the ages of 25 an 30 years of age. This description was a little too vague so I wasn't really finding any thing so then I added hair color which is black and height between 5'4 and 5'6. I was able to find some pretty good mugshots. I printed out the line up and showed it to about 40 people with out giving any information on the actual line up paper. The perpetrator is guilty of drug crimes so thst's what I told all of the witnesses.
I tried to have a good mix between male and female witnesses and almost all of them were the same race as the subjects in the line up which was African American. It was interesting watching the mock witnesses pick because they almost always picked the meaner looking photo. So basically what I came up with was that the basic probability was .021 the chance expectation was .167 and the critical ratio was 1.7. I think my resulta are representative of a non biased line up because they are with in the 1% and definately because I have a better understanding of African American features and how to describe them.
I started this assignment kind of early because I thought it would be hard. I was right. When I was going through the people it was like I was trying to be a perfectionist because I wanted it to be a challenge for people to pick out my suspect. I wanted them to look alike, but not so much a like that they were twins. I started out typing in names that I knew, but that became difficult so I started looking up random characteristics. I started off using a Hispanic man, but I had a hard time finding the right kind of comparisons. I changed to white woman and picked a young looking female. I went with her because I felt like she had a look that made her look like a criminal. I was curious as to if that would make people choose her.
Once I found the woman that I wanted to use I wrote down all the details about her and came up with some details about what I would say to the people I asked to participate in my experiment. In this experiment I chose a white female that had dark brown hair, is about 5’-5’4”, 115-130lbs, and is in her mid-twenties. The actual suspect was basically the average of all of the things I used. I picked out woman with all long dark hair and with the same facial expression. I asked twenty-one people to pick which woman did the crime after giving them the above descriptions. I made it so that one person saw the pictures and answered at a time. I also gave them the description before they could look at the picture, and told them there was no right or wrong answer. Most people thought that it was a trick question, so I had to make it clear to them that it wasn’t a trick question and to pick the person they thought would have committed a crime. Also a lot of people said they looked alike. Another thing that I did was only ask white women to pick out the suspect. I wanted to see if they would all pick the same person, which they didn’t.
Out of the twenty-one people I asked four picked my suspect. The results were pretty even throughout though. Each one the pictures had people who picked them. I thought that meant that I did a good job at picking up a lineup. My exact probability was .208151. I believe that this showed that my lineup was unbiased. My chance expectation is .167 and my critical ratio for diff from chance is .278. I believe that my results were accurate in creating an unbiased lineup because I used people who generally had the same characteristics; I used the same wording each time, and told them the description before showing them the pictures.
This task definitely proved to be more difficult than I had expected, though I did have a lot of fun doing it. I used six white females from the Florida database and at first had a hard time picking a suspect who would have available fillers. Once I did find a suspect, however, fillers still proved to be somewhat difficult to find. It's a little bit hard to know if you're picking people who look too much alike or too different from one another. My suspect had long brown hair, thin lips, a round face, thin eyebrows, and a stocky build; I documented these traits for my description. After looking at her height and weight on her profile, I decided on a range for all of the fillers to be between 5’2” and 5’5” ranging between 160 and 180 pounds. All were between the ages of 37-42. I went about finding my fillers first by going off of the entire list and narrowing it down by birthdates to find people in the proper age range. This was way too broad, so I went back and narrowed everything down by age, height, weight, and hair color. After this I had a more suitable list and was then able to look at individuals to see if she met the criteria to be a filler.
After going through this tedious process to find a suitable lineup, it kind of makes sense why lineups don’t always receive the amount of time and attention that they deserve. It can be a fairly time consuming process and if the police think they have their perpetrator, they’re likely not very worried how good the fillers look.
Once the lineup was made, I went around giving my description to the 22 male and female mock witnesses I used. I isolated them, read the description, and then gave them the lineup of people to choose from. Of these people, four chose my suspect; of these four people, three were female. While most of the results for people picked were around the same number, there was one who was consistently picked more than the others. This was the person who looked very angry in her mug shot. I put this filler in to see if my mock witnesses really would pick her more because of her appearance and seemingly mean demeanor, and they did. I noticed that the males were less critical of getting the features exact when trying to identify the suspect. The females, however, were very critical of their decisions and took longer to choose someone. My lineup had an exact probability of .212005, thus showing that it is unbiased. It also had a chance expectation of .167 and a critical ratio for difference from chance of .184.
I had a hard time at first trying to find suspects. Once I started to get the hang of it, I was really pleased with those I found. I chose to search white males, 6'3" or taller, and about 190-210 lbs. There were definitely a few that looked almost identical, which I was happy about.
When I asked people to identify the suspect, many were completely torn on who to choose. The suspect, they were told, was about 6'3" and a more slim build, looks to be in his early to mid thirties, and has a shaved head. Their probability of guessing the correct suspect was .167, with the critical ratio being -0.994. My exact probability was 0.198239. My confidence ratios fell between the 1-5% intervals. Therefore, I would say I had a nonbiased line-up and my results were okay.
This assignment proved to be a lot harder than it looks. Doing it was fun however. It was neat making up a line-up and then trying to see how many people could correctly guess who the suspect was. It showed just how difficult it can be when you have individuals that look so similar and you may not realize it until you put them right next to each other.
I was pretty excited when I learned about this assignments goal. I had never dealt with creating or viewing a lineup, and I wanted to see if I could create an accurate and ubiased lineup. The first part of the assignment was difficult because I couldn't decide on what suspect to use. After several minutes of searching one of my friends suggested to search his name. Sure enough there was a criminal profile that I thought would be a perfect candidate for this project. I chose to use this suspect as my primary individual in the lineup.
The suspect, John J Knapp, has a conviction record that includes cocaine possession, aggravated assault with a weapon, and battery. Although the suspect's crimes may be distinct, his appearance is in no way at all distinct. This is partially why I chose this suspect because his normal appearance offered a challenge in constructing a lineup. Knapp is 5 feet 10 inches and weighs approxiamately 180 pounds. He has short light brown hair and blue eyes. Distinguishable features include thick lips and large rounded ears. Other than these descriptions, there is not very many characteristics that highlight Knapp.
The next part of the process was difficult because it involved finding other suspects that resemble Knapp. Although I used the same descriptions that characterize Knapp in order to find fillers, it was difficult to find other photos that do not have distinct features that could affect the lineup. Fortunately after some extensive searching I was able to construct a five photo lineup with Knapp being the fourth photo. All of the suspects varied in appearance with general characteristics of short light colored hair, caucasion, approxiamately 170 to 180 pounds, and around a heighth of 5 feet 10 inches.
With my lineup completed I was prepared to put it to use. With the help of twenty different individual "witnesses" that I consorted in the Union I was able to collect the final results on the lineup. Out of the twenty individuals who participated, seven identified the correct suspect. Interestingly, photo number two recieved ten accusations. Additionally, the supect in photo five recieved two votes and the suspect in photo three recieved one.
The results of the lineup were not as successful as I had hoped for. The percentage of those that actually identified the correct suspect was .35. I had a chance expectation of .2, and a critical ratio for difference from chance of 13.19261. These results indicated a couple of things. First off, the lineup I constructed was in no way biased. Furthermore, the lineup may have been too difficult for a witness to break down. In other words, it was a lineup with too similar of suspects, so there was no room for suspects to identify particular signature features. This was an interesting blog to do. I enjoyed making a lineup very much, and perhaps my results have uncovered a possible personal talent. However, in the future I either need to incorporate more distinguishable fillers, or use a more distinct suspect.
Much like my classmates, I expected this assignment to be a breeze. As it turns out, it is incredibly difficult to find white males who shared similar characteristics to my suspect. For my suspect, I elected to choose a 6'3" white male with brown hair. He weighs 220 pounds and has brown eyes. For my fillers, I searched for white males between 6'1" and 6'4", brown hair, and between 200-250 pounds. I chose a tall guy because I figured it would provide more of a challenge. It was particularly difficult in that my five fillers seemed to vary a lot in age and each seemed to have distinguishing features that set themselves apart from the rest. One filler had extremely large ears, one had a flattened nose that looked as if it had been busted numerous times, and one had a serious case of acne. However, aside from those features, the fillers resembled the suspect in every other way.
I showed my lineup to my co-workers, siblings, and girlfriend. Since witnesses often believe that the criminal is in lineup, I began my instructions by informing my mock witnesses that the criminal may or may not be in the lineup. I made sure to give the characteristics before I showed anyone the photos, as to avoid having my witnesses do a facial feature by feature comparision. 7 of the 20 people I showed my lineup to chose the angry-looking man with acne. He really had an intimidating look about him. This reminded me of the class discussion we had when we talked about bias due to a poor photo and how it might be a good idea to smile in your mugshot. 4 people selected the tallest guy who looked like a real creep. He had an extremely long neck and his chin was in the air which made him seem imposing. In the end, only 2 people selected my suspect. I think the reason for this is because my suspect had such an innocent look about him in his mugshot. He looks like an average Joe and does not seem at all threatening in his photo.
The results of my assignment are as follows: the exact Probability is .19823 while the proportion (p) is .100 and the standard error of p was .067 with a chance expectation of .167. The critical ratio for diff. from chance was -.994 which indicates that my lineup is not biased (falls between 1-5% intervals).
I started this assignment a couple days in advance because I didn't know how time consuming it would be and I am glad for that. It took me a lot longer than I expected to find fillers for my suspects line up. I typed in a random last name into the search box to pick my suspect. Then I matched the characteristics with the ones of my suspect these were: white male, brown hair, brown eyes, 25-30, 5'10-6'2, and 175-190lbs. I chose these specifics because I thought it would be fairly easy to find fillers that didn't make the suspect stand out. To my surprise it actually was a challenge to find others that fit my description. This made me think about when the police just want some troublemaker guy to be caught that they probably don't go through this tedious process of actually making a fair and unbiased line up. Which can prove to be a problem.
After my line up was made I went out and asked friends and classmates who they thought fit the description then showed them the line up. Most of the people had a difficult time picking. It usually came down to between two of the people. My suspect was in the fourth spot in the line up. The other guy that people confused him with most was a guy that had his chin tipped upward. In class we learned that most people think that this position indicates that that person is mean and more likely to be picked for commiting the crime. This belief followed through with my findings as well.
My results were the exact probability .003509 with .40 identifying the suspect and chance expectation .167 and standard error .098. Next time I made a line up I would try and pick out one specific characteristic like ears that stick out or something unique and see if that would make my lineup more accurate. I thought that I made a good unbiased line up and this assignment definitely helped me understand more about the whole process.
Alright to start off with making a line up is a lot harder then you would think it is. I went with a description that would cut down the selection for me. My description was a black, young to middle aged male, 300 to 350 pounds, and had short black hair. Even with narrowing down the description it was still hard to find fillers that looked like the suspect. I choice six qualified individuals that I thought looked alike and were compatible. After my line up was down I started asking my friends which one in the line up did they think it was. Like I said before I had six people in my line up. I asked 10 of my friends to choose who they thought out of all the people in the line up, who did it. Their answers went like this 1. 8 people, 2. 0 people, 3. 0 people, 4. 1 person, 5. one person, 6. 0 people. So eight outta ten people actually choose my suspect rather then the other people in the line up. When asked why almost all of my friends thought he was guilty because of the body language the person was giving off in his picture. This being good for my results it was however bad because everybody choose my suspect because how he looked which means that in return I made a bias line up and didnt know it. I should have matched that body language with others that looked like him. It would have been a better line up. Now I couldnt make the link work to caculate this all for me on my computer or the schools so my stats read like this 8/10 people choose my suspect and two however did not. This might be because my line up might be bias, but however I dont thinks so. My final word are that making a line up has a lot more work then you would think, and there are several things that go into it that you would not think.
When I started working on my lineup I wanted to try a different lineup, one that was so typical. So at first i attempted to put together a lineup of pacific islanders/native americans however, there were not enough that looked alike to make an unbiased one. So I search hispanic males around their 20's. But again I wanted this lineup to be atypical, so I made sure to have some defining feature. I looked through all the hispanic inmates that were in their 20's and had neck tattoos. It took a bit longer to put together but I feel it ended up working out for me in the end.
I asked 22 people to help me out. 8 picked the correct inmate based on the 'witnesses's' descriptions. I noticed that when I asked people one on one they seemed to feel more stress even though there was no serious pressure upon them. In the reverse, when I asked people in groups it almost seemed as though they tried to pick someone other than their peers choice, as if to prove they had their individual choice in the matter. Very interesting to observe. After noting that the witnesses had described the suspect having neck tattoos, and then seeing that all the men in the lineup did as well, many started to begin a tiny panic in their voices; it seemed they depended upon that one factor to pick out the suspect.
As I stated, 8 chose the correct person. Another was chosen 6 times and another was chosen 5. Many people had it narrowed down to one of two and sounded stressed when they were told they needed to pick one. I think this correctly relays the pressure felt by this situation in real life. This was a very fun experiment and was almost as a game to the participants as well as myself.
I choose to do a lineup of white people, I am white, and as I’ve learned from class it is easier to spot differences in facial features of your own race. The suspect I choose was a white male who escaped from a Florida corrections facility and still hasn’t been found. He is 28 years old, has short brown hair; he’s 5 foot 8 inches tall, and 155 pounds. Once I had this guy selected I figured it would be a breeze to find people who look similar to put in the lineup, I was wrong. The search criteria that I entered in seemed pretty specific and I did not expect to have so many people pop up in the data base with those characteristics.
After searching through hundreds of faces I finally completed what I thought to be a very good lineup. I showed the lineup to 20 people. I gave the mock witnesses a verbal description of the suspect before showing them the lineup. I could tell by the mock witnesses faces while they were looking at the lineup that it was difficult for them. Some of the mock witnesses made comments about how they all the people in the lineup are too similar and that it is tough to decide.
Only 5 out of the 20 participants identified the suspect out of the lineup. Judging by that fact and the results from the spreadsheets that calculates lineup bias, I determined that my lineup was unbiased. I think if the suspect had some more distinct characteristics he would have been identified more often. This shows me that people who do have distinct facial features could potentially be put in a lineup that is far to easy for the witness. Overall I enjoyed constructing this lineup and if I worked in law enforcement I think I could do a pretty good job of making more non biased lineups.
I chose to do a line up that had six white men between the ages of 21-25. I chose men that had green eyes, short, buzzed brown hair, were between 5’9’’-6’2’’ and between 190-230 pounds. I had 21 people help me out with this assignment and 6 chose the correct inmate. When I asked people what made them include or not include certain individuals there were several similarities in their answers. One individual in my line up, had a slight smile on his face and only one person picked him, all others said he looked "too nice". (He committed two different acts of grand theft with a firearm, not really that nice of a guy.) Another reason one of my males was excluded by many was because seven of my participants said he appeared to have blue eyes not green. Male number 1, who was 22 years old many of my participants felt he looked two old to be between the age range I had given.
When looking back and reflecting on the comments my participants gave, I now understand why creating an unbiased line up is a lot harder than most people give the cops credit for. I didn't do as well as I had thought I would and I thought my lineup was fairly solid. I focused on matching the inmate I chose as guilty and building from there. I focused a lot on the hair cut and chin and all the fillers I chose had very similar characteristics to this. When evaluating my results a feedback it also became obvious that the smiling guy was a weak filler for me to chose because his smile clearly separated him from the blank stares of all the other choices I provided.
This assignment allowed me to see the lineup process from multiple sides of the criminal justice process. From the police perspective, its difficult to create a fair lineup. From the witness perspective, it can be very difficult to pick up on the small differences that make one guy the perpetrator.
I decided to make a lineup with females. Which was a mistake because it was very challenging. I tried to make the lineup as unbiased as I could but most of the women who came up looked very guilty. I searched for women who matched the characteristics of blue eyes, blond or strawberry hair, Height range 5'8 to 5'10, age range 20 to 23, race white, weight range 120 to 140. I picked Sarah L. Hayes to be my suspect. I picked her because she was the most normal looking. Sarah had multiple drug charges. I only used four of the women from the database given to us for the lineup. The other four I found from other databases. I found 10 girls that met the characteristics and decided to only use 8 for my lineup.
Once I had the lineup completed I asked 30 people to pick who they believe committed a theft crime from the description I gave them. However, more people picked a women who matched the description that looked more quilty than the actual suspect. These were my results. 1. 0 2. 0 3. 2 4. 15 5. 13 6. 0 7. 0 8. 0 More people chose 4. who was not the actual suspect than 5. who was the actual suspect. Which proves that people really pick suspects who look more guilty than suspects who look normal. Even though it isn't right it is very true. I knew 25 of the people who I had choose who they thought was the right suspect. Out of the people I knew 10 of them chose the right suspect and the other 13 chose the wrong suspect. The other five were just random people on campus. Out of the five people I didn't know 3 of them chose the right suspect and the other 2 chose the wrong suspect. The exact probability of the test for lineup bias was 0.000023. Which proved that my lineup was biased. Proportion who identified the suspect .433 and who didn't .567. The critical ratio was 3.408.
I believe I described the correct suspect as best that I could. People really just tend to choose people who look more guilty than others. I had a great experience doing this assignment. I enjoyed quizing my friends and the few random people on campus. It was also fun to watch the peoples reaction when they got the suspect right and when they got it wrong.
Creating a lineup that wasn’t bias or alluded to the criminal was hard. It was challenging to search for someone. I first started out putting in random names, which turned up too many subjects. I couldn’t decide who to do. I eventually tried my own last name for fun. I found quite a few people with the same last name, but thankfully they weren’t related to me. However, I used this to start my lineup. I chose to do a different race than my own, Hispanic, to challenge myself. Like the book discussed, often people find it difficult to do cross-racial identifications. I wanted to see if it was more challenging to do another race. I found that to be true. It took me a while to be able to describe the Hispanic criminal in terms that other people would be able to understand. It was also difficult to keep those descriptions the same when interviewing other people. This experience was a little eye opening. In this situation, I was only required to make a lineup that had no importance what so ever, and it was difficult. I can’t imagine trying to create one based off of someone’s description when it really matters.
In my line up, I chose Hispanic individuals that were 5'09'' and roughly 190 pounds. He had brown eyes, and claimed he had brown hair. At first, I used those statistics to find matches. However, they were way too broad. I knew my chances of finding a match were going to be very difficult after that. Even though, I had picked what I would assume a typical Hispanic man. The system shot all different types of people at me. Many of them did not resemble the man I had originally chosen. Like mentioned earlier, they claimed that his hair was brown. However, it looked bald to me. When I put in “brown hair” in the search, I received people with a full head of hair. I then changed his hair color to bald. That seemed to help a lot. I still had to filter through many people; however, it gave me a closer match.
All of the people I interviewed were Caucasian. Like I thought, I found that it was difficult for people to muster up a difference between their characteristics and ours. They weren’t able to accurately identify the witnesses and it seemed challenging for most. I used six suspects in my line up. Only seven out of the twenty-two people I interviewed got it. The studies exact probability was .0395. The chance expectation was .167, and the critical ratio for diff from chance was 1.526.
This assignment ended up being a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. Creating an unbiased lineup can be a very tricky job, as we have all learned. This assignment made me realize that maybe it isn't always law enforcement's fault that a lineup can be bias. If anyone is interested here is a link to my lineup:
http://i44.tinypic.com/35bw9dk.jpg
When I created this lineup, I was almost sure that I had not created a biased lineup. Unfortunately, this was not correct. I began my search with a Caucasian Male age 55-65 with White hair. There were many results that seemed to work great! If you look at my lineup, the actual suspect that I chose is the man at the bottom right. I told my friends and classmates that the offender was a "White haired bearded man between the ages of 55-65." The results that I received were as follows: 1:5 2:4 3:1 4:4 5:0 6:6.
The exact probability of my lineup was 0.064705. We can be 95% sure that my lineup is bias. For the most part, the choices made were pretty evenly distributed. The problem that I encountered was that I had a few fillers that received almost no votes. I also had a filler that resembled that actual suspect too much.
Overall I found this to be a very entertaining assignment. I found it very fun to create the lineup. If you looked at mine lineup in the link above, you can see that I used a little humor in choosing my fillers as well. I also found it entertaining to show my friends the lineup because most of them laughed. Almost everyone asked me what class this was for, and they said the class sounded awesome. Most people also told me that I didn't provide enough description for them to make a choice, so they had to guess.
This topical blog ended up being really fun and interesting. I didn't think that it would be this hard though. I chose to put together a lineup of middle aged white males. I looked up men that were in their thirties and were obviously in the system for some sort of criminal background. I chose six white males that were bald and had facial hair. The height I chose to do was around 5"11 to 6"0. Finding them was easier than I thought because it was so broad. I tried to create an unbiased lineup, but this turned out to be harder than I thought. I showed about twenty females and twenty-five males my lineup and it turns out that it turned out to be a completely biased lineup. Everyone chose the person that was the suspect. It showed that my lineup was about 91% biased.
I never understood that the lineups were so difficult to create. It must be hard to find people that all look similar and have the exact similar features. It also must be really hard to choose the actual suspect because when I was asking the people for this lineup they were nervous and fidgety and did not know exactly what to say or who to choose. I got a lot of similar answers and almost everyone said "I don't know" when they first looked at it to answer the questions. A lot of the people I asked to answer the questions were confused and had to guess, but most of them ended up guessing the right person. I really enjoyed this assignment because it helped me realize that it is a lot harder to choose a lineup in real life.
I was really excited when I heard about this assignment. I was thinking that it was going to be somewhat easy...all we had to do was create a lineup and show it to some friends. Well, I was wrong. This assignment proved to be much harder than I originally thought. Entering characteristics and picking out the first person was easy, but finding fillers that looked similar but not too much was hard. In class we had talked about the men putting their chin up in the photographs, and I found that a lot in the database. I chose 2 of those photos, and almost everybody that I had look at the lineup chose one of those two (one was the right person.) Once I started showing people the lineups, I realized that I did something that I probably should not have done. At the bottom of my lineup page, I had put the description. Thinking about it, I should have just told them the description and not let them see it while they are looking at the suspects. I also had a hard time coming up with the descriptions of the suspect. That made it harder for the people looking, and I feel like they just started guessing, most of which guessed right.
I created 2 different lineups. I did one with men, and then another one with women. I thought it would be interesting if there was a difference in the amount of people who correctly identified the person, based on their sex. I had 20 different people look at my lineups. For the men in the lineups, the description was: brown eyes, between the ages of 18-25, dark and heavy set eyebrows, short and shaved head, a large neck, a defined jaw line, between 180-210 pounds, and a height between 6'2 and 6'5. The photos printed out black and white so that made it a little more difficult because you couldn't see the color of their eyes. Of those 20 people who looked at, 13 people got it right on the first guess. I was surprised that that many people got it. The exact probability of these results was .000002. This means that my lineup was biased. The chance expectation was .167 (not quite sure what that means), and the critical ratio was 4.532.
My women lineup was harder than the male one. Not many people got the suspect right. My description was between the ages of 18-25, between 130-150 pounds, 5'3-5'5, long brown hair, brown eyes, thin eyebrows, a large nose, and a large bottom lip. Again, because the pictures printed out black and white, it is hard to pick out what color their eyes and hair was. I had the same 20 people look at this lineup and of those, only 5 identified the correct suspect. This really surprised me. I thought that more than 5 would get it right. The exact probability of the results is .129. The chance expectation was .167, and the critical ratio was .861. There was bias in this lineup.
For the most part I thought this topical blog was very fun and interesting however I definitely underestimated how difficult it would be to find fillers in order to make my suspect not standout. It's also difficult to come up with a description for the person you're describing because that can also be biased in itself. The lineup of people I chose was black males between the ages of 20-25, shaved black hair, brown eyes, 170-200 lbs, 5'9"-6'0" feet tall, and the last feature was a big nose. When I first put that in the description I thought it might be a dead giveaway but it was easier than I thought to find people with big noses. It was actually kind of difficult to make the lineup because you don't want your suspect to stand out but at the same time you don't want it to be too difficult for the mock witness to guess who the suspect is. Out of the thirteen people I asked, seven of them chose my suspect. At the beginning there was a close tie between two photos but ultimately the suspect I had got more votes.
After putting in my findings into the lineup bias test, I found that my lineup was about 85% biased. I find this very interesting because when you're making the lineup you think you're doing a good job of making it and then you realize that everyone keeps picking your suspect and you're thinking shoot maybe I didn't do such a good job. It was a really fun assignment and I like watching the look on people's faces because they're concentrating so hard and you can tell that some of them are unsure of themselves. I got a lot of people changing their minds and going back and forth and when people guessed right they were really proud of themselves which was kind of intersting. Overall, this was a very fun assignment and I learned a lot about what it takes to make a lineup.
I thought that this was a really interesting activity! I initially decided to come up with the characteristics of the suspect. I decided my suspect would be describes as a bald, white man, roughly 250 pounds, middle age. I then did a search on the Florida prisons website. It turned out the number of bald white men of this age and size was somewhat limited. The first photo I came across was the person I deemed to be the suspect. What limited me even more was attempting to come up with men who were wearing the same type of clothes, as some of them were wearing street clothes in the photos. After about an hour of searching, I had come up with seven men who fit my relatively vague description.
One man had a particularly unhappy face on in the photo. Remembering from class that people would most likely pick this man as a suspect, I created two different lineups. One did not include this photo and one did. An issue that I was worried about was the similarities of the photos. Since my description was vague, any of my photos could have been the suspect. In the lineup with all neutral faces, the results of the mock witnesses seemed to be pretty even. In the lineup with the man with the unhappy face, he was most commonly chosen as the suspect. This did validate what we learned in class. I was not at all surprised by this result because I probably would have probably chosen him too!
I asked 15 mock witnesses to look at my lineup of neutral faced men. Many of these people had a hard time choosing a person they believed would be the suspect. Of those 15, three people chose the suspect. The exact probability was .236256. The chance of expectation was .167, and the critical ratio for diff from chance was .323. These results were much different than the lineup including the angry man. Of 15 different people I asked, only one guessed the actual suspect. The majority chose the angry man.These led the exact probability to be .194716, the chance of expectation was still .167, and the critical ratio for diff. from chance was -1.553. The mock witnesses for this lineup had a much easier time picking a suspect. Even though only one person chose my suspect, seven people chose the angry man. I thought it was really interesting to have points we learned in class be proven by this activity.
This assignment was more time-consuming than I had expected, but it was very interesting. It was also kind of difficult to find a group of similar looking people for my mock line-up. I didn’t want them to look too much alike so that the witnesses wouldn’t be able to distinguish them, but I also didn’t want them to look completely different. My group of suspects were all African-American, dark-skinned, short hair, 150-190 pounds, between the ages of 27-34. I read the description of the suspect to 19 people. Out of the 19 people, 5 guessed the correct suspect on the first try. I showed my line-up to people who were all Caucasian. According to our reading assignments, this would make it more difficult to determine differences among my line-up of African-Americans. Ideally, my mock-witnesses should have been African-American to decrease the cross-cultural bias. The exact probability of my results was 0.054723. That means we can be 95% sure that my line-up was biased. The problem I faced was that I didn’t have any distinguishing characteristics to provide my mock-witnesses, so they didn’t have a reason to pick one person over the other. Most of my witnesses just ended up choosing the person they felt looked “the most guilty”. This scares me because this could easily happen in real-life situations. The witness might not be able to determine who the actual perpetrator is; therefore, they just pick the person they think looks the most capable of committing a crime. This assignment was very eye-opening. It made me realize how much work cops need to put into creating an accurate line-up.
Overall, I thought this assignment was really fun. I liked that we actually got to do some hand-on work instead of just reading or watching something. I also thought it was very beneficial that we discussed this topic in class before doing the work. While putting together my lineup I tried to use everything we talked about. It definitely helped to have some guidelines to follow. Like many others, I thought that this assignment would be quick and easy. I was wrong. Choosing my suspect was about the only easy part. Trying to find good fillers was really hard. I feel like I put a lot of pressure on myself to create an unbiased lineup because of how much it was stressed during the lecture. I found myself picking fillers that might have looked too much like the actual suspect. I needed to use a little more variation while still matching the description that I came up with.
My description was a white female with greasy, light brown hair, brown eyes, 120-140 pounds, late 20's to early 30's, 5'5"-5'8", and thin lips. This is the exact description that I read to my mock witnesses. I was pretty confident in my lineup because I put it together very carefully and spent quite a bit of time on it. Out of 20 mock witnesses, only 4 guessed the actual suspect based on the description I gave them. Most of them really had to think about it for a while before they chose a person. This made me wonder if I had made it so hard that a person who actually witnessed the crime would be able to pick the suspect out.
I put this information into the bias calculator. All of the numbers were very confusing at first, but I tried to figure them all out by the instructions the best that I could. What I got out of it was that my exact probability is .202204, and by the guidelines given, it seems that my lineup was pretty unbiased. I know understand how hard putting together a really good lineup can be. You have to find the right balance between too hard and too easy. I think it would be a very good idea for the police to have to be trained in this procedure, because an innocent person could be wrongfully convicted.
This topical blog was fun to do but took more time than I thought. Two other people that I work with brought their line-ups to work and asked people (including me) and it is very interesting to see the other side of things: to watch others choose a suspect and be the one choosing. At first I picked someone who was difficult to find good fillers for so I started all over. Once I got 6 men that I assumed made a good line-up I asked people and found out that I STILL had not made a good enough line-up because nearly everyone chose my suspect. I find that descriptions used are very vague and need to have more detail; however, that may be all a witness remembers and has to go off of. My results were as follows:
TEST FOR LINEUP BIAS
Instructions.
1. Enter the total number of mock-witness choices here: 16
2. Enter the number of mock witnesses who chose the suspect here: 10
3. Enter the total number of persons in the lineup here: 6
Note: Fields in which data can be entered are shown in boxes.
Other fields are calculated fields.
Exact probability of these results 0.000044
Proportion identifying the suspect (p) .625
q = 1 - p .375
n 16
Standard Error of p .121
Chance expectation: .167
Critical Ratio for diff from Chance: 3.787
(.05 requires 1.96)
(.01 requires 2.58)
I loved this assignment! It was really fun creating the line up and surprisingly easy as well. At first, I searched my own name in the Florida Prison Database and came up with nothing. Then, I decided to base my suspect off of someone who looked like me, so I typed in characteristics to describe me: white female, 5' 8", brown hair and eyes, 20 years old. I came up with very few matches so I broadened my search a little. Eventually I ended up searching white females, ages 18-22, brown hair and eyes, 130-150 lbs, with a height of 5' 7" to 5' 9". I think finding a "suspect" and fillers was easier for me because I made a very detailed search. One thing I noticed when looking through the photos was how inaccurate the classifications of race were in the database. I was searching for only white women, but some of the results were clearly Hispanic, Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, Asian and even a number of black women were included, yet they were all classified as white. I don't know if the inmates are the ones that provide their race or if it is written by an officer, but it was strange to see how wrong some of them were. Another thing I thought was interesting was looking through these women's crimes. I wasn't surprised to find that most of them were incarcerated due to drug related crimes. I think in a sociology class I learned that drug crime is one of, if not the most prominent crime committed and convicted in the United States. While I was searching through the pictures of women, I noticed that a lot of them had rather large foreheads. I'm no phrenologist, so I didn't really put any thought behind it, but I thought it would be an interesting characteristic to use in my line up.
My lineup consisted of 6 white women, ages 18-22, with long brown hair, brown eyes, thin appearance, average height, and large foreheads. Now that I think about it, I completely disregarded looking for similar clothing, but it turned out to be a non-issue because most of the clothing looked similar anyway. I then took it around my building and to classes and had people pick out a girl that matched the description I provided. I wrote out a description that I gave to every person before I gave them the lineup to look at. I also took away the description when I handed them the lineup, so that they would just be matching the girls feature by feature on the list. My description looked just like this:
Gender: Female
Race: White
Age: Young, 18-22
Hair: Long, Brown
Eyes:Brown
Weight: Thin, 130-150 lbs
Height: Average, 5'7"-5'9"
Other Characteristics: Large Forehead
I got the opinions of 50 different individuals, all Caucasians, on the advice of the article we read, suggesting that we should have around 50 people evaluating their same race. It was funny listening to people when they were trying to pick out the suspect. A lot of them were taken aback when I showed them the lineup and they found that every girl had a large forehead. They seemed to have forgotten the other criteria on the list. I wonder if this is the recency effect taking place, stating that people remember the most recent information presented to them best, or if that was just the most memorable trait from the list. Still, most of my mock witnesses chose the girl who appears to have the largest forehead, even if she didn't match the rest of the criteria as well as the others. Some other funny things to hear were people saying they didn't want to choose the girl that looked scariest because "they thought it was too obvious." Some chose the most innocent looking girl because "they thought it was a trick question." Even when I told them that the test wasn't about if they got it right or wrong, they were determined to "beat my test." They got frustrated with me when I wouldn't tell them who my suspect was (just in case they would tell someone who I was going to ask later), so I ended up promising to post the "correct" answer on Facebook after I turned this in.
The results of my lineup were about what I expected. Of the 50 people I asked, only 8 chose the "right" girl. The exact probability of these result was 15.1%. This was within both the 5% confidence interval and the 1% confidence interval, indicating that my lineup was not biased.
I found some difficulty with this assignment, but I eventually got all of the pictures together and I believe that it was pretty unbiased. Granted, it was difficult to do this lineup the first time, but if it were my job I'm sure I would get the hang of it fairly quickly. Most of the people that looked at my lineup actually picked people who were not the suspect, which may show a slight bias in the favor of the suspect; however, this was not outside of the normal variation, and quite a few people picked the right suspect also.
I can see how a cop could just breeze through this crucial step of the suspect identification process, because even though it isn't an extremely difficult task at all, it can be tedious and maybe sometimes boring to be sitting at a computer making lineups all day instead of being out cruising around in a squad car when the weather is nice. I believe that because of this potentiality for bias (whether it's intentional or unintentional), police departments should either hire a trained professional to make lineups, or at least give all officers formal training on such things. Although I found some difficulty in getting pictures of people who look alike, and finding people to be mock witnesses, this assignment did a good job in showing me the potential problems in the justice system because I could see all the places that police officers can make errors.
This assignment was definitely very enjoyable! Everything we learned in class about memory and how people go about deciding on suspects showed to be prominent in my findings. I asked a total of 30 of my friends to participate in this "experiment". I felt like I created a pretty flawless line-up and I attempted to not make my description too descriptive to where I actually pointed out the suspect for them.
My description of the suspect was as follows: The suspect is a white male, age ranging from 19-21 with a fairly strong jaw, square chin, brown hair with a buzzed cut, protruding ears, large nose, green eyes, and dark eyebrows. I had some difficulties trying to decide exactly what I wanted my perp to look like. I put in some very specific things, such as weight and a height range but things werent looking so well. I came to the realization that maybe the correlation between the specifics and the very general details werent matching up right so it was only giving my 2 or 3 suspects to use. I ended up taking out the weight range and changing the type of crime commited and turned out with more results.
My line-up results came out to be fairly surprising though. Like I said I thought I created a pretty objective line-up, but my participants still pointed out the "actual" suspect a lot more often than all the others except for my suspect #6. A reason I was surprised at this was because I figured that most people would chose the more angry looking suspect possibilty or at least the guy that looked more like a criminal. I think it all has to do with how you present the scenario as well. Also I believe another factor in ones decision making could be their age. College students could be more attentive to details and the way things look and older individuals could be more prone to judging a person on how their personality affects their actions and choice to commit a crime according to their facial features.
At first, my description of the correct suspect seemed to stump the participants, as they chose the suspect according to their perception of a "strong jaw" and "square chin". It was clear that there was no bias, seeing as I kept the ethnicity of the suspects the same as the participants, but there was a sort of facial feature prejudice when it came to correctly identifying whose chin was more square and who's ears were bigger. It just all depended on the perception of the individual participant. Another factor that probably influenced the validity of my data was peer "advising". Some of my participants happened to be in the same room and had a bad habit of asking "Hey man, what did you pick" or "I think I'm going to go with what he/she said". I made sure to keep from doing that in the long run.
My exact percentage was .109776, my proportion of identifying the suspect was .233, the standard error was .077, and my chance of expectation was .167, and my critical ratio was .863.
2/16/12
For this assignment I went to the Florida list of inmates and started putting together a list for the lineup. At first I was searching African American men but was having a hard time making sure that these individuals were not too similar looking or too different looking from each other. I attribute this to a cross culture effect or cross race effect. If I was having second thoughts about my choices then I was thinking that the people whom I would ask (the majority of the people I know on campus and would ask are Caucasian) would also have a hard time with the choices I had made. So I made a new lineup of Caucasian men that were between the ages of 22 and 26. That way when I describe the suspect and show the lineup they will have familiar characteristics to the people they see every day, especially in Iowa. I chose and individual that was not terribly threatening looking or too suspicious. I did this for two reasons. One, because I get scared easily and I did not want to have these images of scary-looking convicts in my head. Two, I did not want the suspect to stand out in the lineup if he looked ‘too scary’ compared to the fillers.
Aside from the general appearance of the inmates I made sure that the pictures were similar to each other on several accounts. I wanted to make sure that the persons were approximately the same distance away from the camera. People that were bigger in the frame seemed guiltier to me. I also tried to avoid images where the faces were either tilted down or up (Otto’s chin-up effect).
I eventually found the six men that would make up my lineup. I started by choosing one individual and the witness’ description was then based off him. I told participants that this was a rape case and I was going to give them a description of the suspect given by the witness/victim. They would be shown the six-person lineup and would either say which person they felt fit the description best or they would say that they did not think that anyone fit the description. The description I used was that the suspect was a white male between the ages of 20 and 25. He was medium height, thin, with blue eyes (even though I used black and white photos I informed participants that all members of the lineup had blue eyes). The perpetrator had a long thin face and brown hair. I also mentioned that he was kind of cute (I think this was a terrible idea. It then depended on the participants’ opinion of who was cute and who was not).
I asked approximately 28 people about the lineup. Eleven of these participants picked the suspect out of the lineup. After entering these numbers in the bias calculation Excel sheet I found out that my lineup was far from accurate. This is very discouraging considering that I am fully aware of all the other potentially contaminating things that may take place not only during the creation of a lineup but throughout the entire process of finding, trying and convicting a defendant. It just goes to show that a lot more research needs to be done in the area of eyewitness testimony.
First reading the directions to this project, I figured it couldn't be that hard to put together a lineup with people who look somewhat similar. People are mistaken for other people all of the time so I figured with a large amount of people in the system, it wouldn't be hard to put 6 people together for a lineup. I began the project and became aware of how difficult of a task it is because although some people have some of the same characteristics, they can look very different. There were people I thought would look similar but the quality of the picture was different or the person was in a different position in the picture than the other person was.
I wanted to look up older men because they usually seem to look more similar as they age because of the ruggedness and more wrinkled faces. I looked up men 45 to 55 years old who were about 5 feet 10 inches to 6 feet 4 inches tall with green eyes and brown hair. the person weights about 200 lbs. to 250 lbs. I feel the men who came up under these characteristics looked very very similar. they all had the same facial expression as well as a frowning face with no lips. They all had very short buzzed hair with green eyes. None of the eyes stuck out which was a good thing because I know people would have chosen the guy with popping green eyes. They all looked similar in height and weight as well as their age. I feel my lineup was very unbiased because many people could not choose one person right away. Many people would stare at the lineup and begin to narrow it down. Once many of the people would narrow their choices down, he or she would normally be wrong. Here are my results:
I gave the exact descriptions of the suspect to every person I asked and then showed each of them the lineup. Four out of the thirty people I asked gave the correct suspect. The exact probability of these results was 0.1847 and the critical ratio was -0.537 which proved to me to be very unbiased. This was within the 5% and 1% confidence interval proving my lineup was unbiased. I wondered if maybe my lineup was too difficult for people to choose the right person because the suspects were all similar in every aspect. All in all this assignment proved to me how much work and thought must go into putting lineups together and also how people can choose the wrong person as the suspect.
I found this assignment to be very frustrating. Going into the assignment I thought it was going to be pretty easy to put together a line up. Well, I was wrong. I found it to be really difficult as it took me about 30 min to get one together. My suspect was a white male who was 25 years of age and who was 5’10 200 pounds. He also had short black hair with blue eyes. In trying to find a match for this guy I looked up white males who were between 5’8 and 6’2 and also between the 180 and 220 pounds. The age range I used was between 20 and 30. In using these credentials the website brought up a pretty good list of other individuals. As stated before after about 30 min or so of looking around I finally came up with a list. I have to admit I think three of the guys I chose matched my suspect really well and the other two had somewhat of a resemblance but you could tell they didn’t fit the description.
After I finally got my list compiled I went around and asked 20 various different people ranging from my roommates to people I know from class to read the description and pick the suspect. As it turned out I feel I had a pretty good list. Of the 20 people who I asked only 7 people picked it correctly. The data showed me that my standard error was .107, the chance expectation was .167 and finally the critical ratio for different chance was 1.719. According to this data it seemed that I had an unbiased line up.
Overall I found this assignment to be difficult but yet still entertaining to do. Before doing this assignment I thought the whole process would be fairly easy. I thought all you have to do is just pick out six photos that looked similar and you would be good to go. But just the smallest things you have to take into account in order to get a fair unbiased line up.
I really enjoyed this assignment. It was a lot of fun and I also learned a lot from it. I actually found my suspects relatively easy. For my perpetrator, I just typed in my brother’s first name, Andrew, and added an s at the end of it to make it the last name, Andrews. Obviously with that popular of a name, my search resulted in plenty of results. After clicking on a few names, I found one I liked because he looked a little different. He was a black male and had lighter eyes, so I wanted to choose him. I then just copied all his information down and typed similar results to search. I found a decent number of matching suspects, and eventually came up with a mug book with six suspects. I asked my parents, boyfriend, best friends, and co-workers to guess who it was. I gave them the description of “black male, lighter skin, light eyes, short black hair”. Unfortunately, I must be worse than the cops at making these. Out of the fifteen people I asked, only ONE answered correctly. With these stats, unfortunately my lineup was biased. The calculator thing was actually kind of hard for me to interpret, which was frustrating because I just took stats last semester and got an A in the class. I was very bummed my lineup wasn’t more successful because personally I thought I did a really good job. Once I told people the answer, the blamed in on the quality of the perpetrator’s picture. However, something did happen that I found very interesting. The last picture I found to put on my lineup was of a man wearing a suit and tie. He looked like a very clean cut guy. I thought that this would deter people from choosing him as a suspect. However I was wrong. Almost half of the people I asked chose him as the perpetrator. Although sometimes the people who didn’t choose him said they would have if he was wearing different clothes. But I thought it was interesting that so many people chose him in the first place. Overall, I really liked this assignment (even though I sucked at it). It makes you realize how tough police have it in trying to come up with lineups and mug books.
I really did enjoy this topical blog when I created the line-ups and picked out a certain suspect and his description. It didn’t really surprised me that finding fillers took me a little bit of time, but in the end it was well worth it, because surprisingly the actual suspect I picked out, wasn’t the most popular one my friends chose.
I didn’t look up anyone’s last name I stuck with just looking in the Florida prisons, and the people who are in there because of drug related crimes. I scrolled down and picked a random guy’s name and profile, then copied down a lot of the same characteristics on his profile and used them to describe to my friends who my suspect was. I described the guy as being in his mid-30’s, under 5’10” in height, has dark hair, is black, has brown or dark eyes (since the printer paper came out in black and white), over 200 pounds, and has a shaven head. The other five guys I used also where in the Florida jail for drug related crimes as well. They had all the same characteristics, some more than others that described the suspect I choose. One of the fillers I chose the picture was taken at a weird angle, so it made some of my friends confused on whether he was the suspect because it made him came across as a shorter guy. Mainly, the majority of them didn’t pick that specific photo, but it made them think, could he possibly be the suspect. But because my suspect looks more Hispanic, then black, in the black and white computer paper, a lot of my friends didn’t devote or barely glance at his picture as much as the other criminal’s pictures who looked more tough and meaner. So I thought for the most part my line-ups weren’t too biased because all the men that I choose had similar features.
First, I explained the characteristics to my friends, a total of 10 of them participated in this assignment. Secondly, I showed them the printed out paper. Some of them took their time to go over the line-up. One mentioned, it’s really hard to pick which one because I have two in mind, but I’m not sure who to pick because they both come across as similar to one another. Another friend mentioned how short one of the guys appeared (the same picture I mentioned in the paragraph before this one), but he didn’t look as thick in the face as the other guys, so she crossed him off. Then a few of them mentioned they picked one of the guys you had their chin tilted up more (similar to what we talked about in class) they thought he came across as more intimidating, which made him appear more guilty. Only 2 people out of my 10 picked out my suspect, my other friends had a tight race between 3 different other guys who were the fillers.
I had a total of 10 mock-witnesses, 2 of them chose the suspect on the first try, and there were a total of 6 people in the line-up to choose from. The probability of getting these results is 0.290710 which is right in the middle of the 5% and 1% confidence intervals. My chance expectation was .167 and the critical ratio of diff from chance was 0.264. I believe my results came out as good, because they were right in between the 1% confident levels, so in other words I created an unbiased line-up.
Write about your experience and findings here.
This assignment was harder than it sound, but i found it useful. Picking the suspect was simple, but then finding fillers that didnt create a biased line-up proved to be difficult. I had 6 white women with roundish faces in my line up. There qualifications were they had to have brown hair and eyes, be between 30 and 35 years old, and be between 5 foot 2 inches and 5 foot 5 inches, and stay between 130-145 lbs. I wanted to make sure that all my fillers fit all the criterias and didnt have anything that made them stand out and seem like the suspect.
When showing this to my friends and coworkers, i first read the description and then gave them the line up to look at. They found it very difficult to pick which one was the suspect. They wanted to ask me more questions or look at me to see if id give them hits to who it really was. I had to keep a straight face and not give any extra cues to anyone to sway their thoughts. Out of the 17 people i asked only 3 picked the right suspect. This agrees with my chance expectation of .167 The exact probability of my results were 0.242 and the critical ratio of diff from chance was .21.
this really makes you wonder how often this happens in the real world. How many times are people not often able to identify a person and just take a guess. In the real world they may be told they dont have to pick someone if they dont feel like its anyone and that wasnt the case here, but how many people still feel like they have to pick someone out of those people. How many people pick the wrong person and send the wrong person to jail? How often is the perp in the lineup but let go because they werent properly identified by the person looking at the line up?? Its kind of scary to think about that and know that all those situations probably happen and more often then we know it.
Not only is it hard for the person to pick someone to pick the suspect out of a line up, but its also hard for someone to make a lineup. I was lucky enough to not have to make a live line up and could use any picture i found on the internet. How are the people who create lineups able to do it. It has to take days and possibly weeks to complete a live lineup. To try and find live people who fit all the criterias and live close enough to be considered a suspect.
Over all I learned there is so much work put into a lineup, and its so easy for it to be wrong. A person needs to be 110% sure before picking someone.