When A Lie Becomes Memory's Truth: Memory Distortion After Exposure to Misinformation1

The confidence that eyewit nesses express in their lineup identifications of criminal sus pects has a large impact on criminal proceedings. Many convictions of innocent people can be attributed in large part to confident but mistaken eye witnesses. Although reason able correlations between confidence and accuracy can be obtained under certain con ditions, confidence is governed by some factors that are unre lated to accuracy. An under standing of these confidence factors helps establish the con ditions under which confi dence and accuracy are related and leads to important practi cal recommendations for crimi nal justice proceedings.