Are You A Good Eyewitness?
Whether researching hundreds of 100-year-old news articles for my books in which people are summarily convicted of crimes based on the positive identification of a suspect by a single eye witness, or learning of the numerous people in recent times sent to prison based on faulty eye-witness accounts, the dependability of the so-called “eye witness” must be called into question.
It is now widely known that a condition called face blindness exists in which 2% of the population cannot, for example, recognize their own child in a group of assorted children. There is an equal percentage of super-recognizers who have the uncanny ability to recognize people, as an example, seen briefly only one time many decades previous. The rest of us inhabit the spectrum somewhere in between these two extremes.
Eyewitness misidentification is the greatest contributing factor to wrongful convictions proven by DNA testing, playing a role in more than 70% of convictions. The horrifying fact that "eyewitness testimony" is so freely admitted in criminal court cases with no ability-testing required of the eyewitness, whether it be a police officer or civilian, is not only criminal, but if compelled in the reexamination of such cases might well result in hundreds of criminal cases being overturned.
There is a fascinating test online you can take to see wherein the spectrum your facial recognition abilities lie:
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