Toward a more informative psychological science of eyewitness evidence

Like Hugo Munsterberg, we believe that psychological science can inform the courts and police regarding eyewitness evidence. But 100 years into the enterprise, the body of knowledge acquired to date demands considerable circumspection, both in the claims expert psychological witnesses make in court and in the recommendations psychologists tender to investigating officers. There are a number of points regarding eyewitness evidence that psychologists can offer with considerable confidence, but many matters are as yet open to debate (and some issues are likely to remain unsettled for a long time). We encourage researchers, law enforcement and the legal community to (a) identify and prioritize the problems to be solved, (b) focus on a more integrative empirical approach, including more of the field experiments currently in use, as well as new descriptive research, especially on base rates and (c) use basic psychological theory and principles to consolidate the wide range of phenomena present in individual cases. Copyright (C) 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.