Oral Presentation: “Be on the Lookout!”: Content of Perpetrator Description by an Eyewitness Affects Selection Time of Potential Suspects

Title: “Be on the Lookout!”: Content of Perpetrator Description by an Eyewitness Affects Selection Time of Potential Suspects

Abstract:

When a crime has just happened, police enforcement need to react quickly before the perpetrator vanishes. They try to obtain a description of the perpetrator from eyewitnesses to share with other officers to react quickly. There is thus a crucial balance to find between the quantity of descriptors to process and the time to consider someone as suspect based on those descriptors. Participants (N = 72) were randomly assigned to one of four conditions that differed based on the description content. They involved either a general description (e.g., age, ethnicity, height, corpulence, etc.), a description involving solely facial features, a standard description (i.e., general and facial features), and a detailed description (i.e., the standard description and new facial features). Participants were then asked to sort through 65 pictures and determine whether those matched or not the given description. Results showed
that the decision time to reject a non-matching portrait is inferior to the decision time for description matching portraits. Moreover, general descriptions and standard descriptions were processed faster than the descriptions emphasizing facial features. The discussion emphasizes the efficiency of shorter descriptions to sort potential suspects when a crime has been or will imminently be perpetrated.