Memory, Confidence, and the Witness Stand
An essay on the persistent gap between what jurors believe about eyewitness memory and what four decades of research have demonstrated. The problem, the author suggests, is not ignorance but a particular kind of confidence the courtroom is structured to reward.
A witness who hesitates is, in the ordinary moral grammar of the courtroom, a witness who is uncertain. A witness who answers without pause is sure. The mapping is intuitive, and it is wrong.1
The relationship between expressed confidence and accuracy in eyewitness identification is, under controlled conditions, modest. Under the conditions that actually obtain in criminal investigations—suggestive lineups, repeated interviewing, the passage of time—it is weaker still, and in some studies disappears entirely.2 What survives, and what the witness brings to the stand, is the confidence itself, now decoupled from whatever epistemic warrant it once had.
Footnotes
Suggested Citation
Priya Ranganathan, Memory, Confidence, and the Witness Stand, Cognition Review Vol. III, No. 2 — Spring 2026 (2026).