The other-race effect in eyewitness identification - What do we do about it?

The greater difficulty of other-race relative to own-race facial recognitio n is one of the most researched issues in eyewitness identification. The au thors discuss articles in the March 2001 issue of Psychology, Public Policy , and Law as well as some methodological and interpretational problems rega rding demonstrations of the other-race identification effect. In spite of s ome problems with the literature, they conclude that the other-race identif ication effect is real and that it is relevant to the criminal justice syst em. The authors propose a system-variable approach in which other-race iden tification cases receive special preventive treatment at the time of the id entification test rather than after-the-fact attempts to assist triers; of fact. These preventive procedures include using same-race lineup constructo rs, larger numbers of fillers in other-race cases, dual lineup techniques i n other-race cases, or a combination of these procedures.