Objectivity bias in eyewitness performance

Two experiments were conducted to explore whether facial identification performance could be predicted from observers' attitudes toward eyewitness evidence, perceived personal objectivity, expressed confidence, or completeness and accuracy of verbal descriptions of the suspect. None of these predictors was found to be significantly related to identification performance with either target‐present or target‐absent photoarrays. However, observers who perceived themselves to be more objective were likely to give higher confidence ratings regardless of the accuracy of their identification performance, and they were likely to include more incorrect elements in their verbal descriptions. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.