The Cross‐Race Effect in Lineups Versus Showups

ABSTRACT A witness's ability to discriminate innocent from guilty suspects is reliably higher for same‐race than for cross‐race faces. We investigated the relative magnitude of this well‐established effect in lineups versus showups. Based on diagnostic feature‐detection theory, we hypothesized that the cross‐race effect (CRE) for showups would be larger than that for lineups. However, contrary to our predictions, a similarly strong CRE was observed for showups and lineups, and high‐confidence accuracy trended lower in the cross‐race condition regardless of presentation format (showup vs. lineup). These results may indicate that witnesses did not initially encode certain diagnostic features of cross‐race faces that might otherwise be put to good use in lineups. Moreover, the apparent failure of participants to adjust for the lower discriminability in the cross‐race situation when expressing confidence may indicate that they may not fully appreciate how much more difficult it is to identify faces of a different race.