Republish Thursday: Gladwell on the Duke LaX Case

I may have mentioned this earlier in this blog (or perhaps it was my other blog) but Malcolm Gladwell is one of my favorite authors. I've read both of his books, The Tipping Point and Blink, and for lack of a better word, they're both fabulous.

In any case, here's a reposting of a couple of his thoughts on the recent Duke LaCrosse Team scandal:

I don’t have any opinion on the guilt or innocence of Duke lacrosse players
charged with raping a exotic dancer. But I do think the incident affords a
small opportunity to think about the value of eyewitness testimony. The
accuser, who is black, identified two players alleged to have assaulted her
after looking over photographs of all of the white players on the lacrosse
squad. On the basis of that identification, the players were
indicted by a grand jury. So far, the accuser’s testimony is the most
powerful fact in the prosecution’s arsenal. The question is: how much
credence should we give that identification?
Psychologists don’t particularly
like eye witness testimony. Elizabeth Loftus has done a lot of really
interesting work exposing its various frailties. Juries and
laypeople (and prosecution attorneys) tend to have a great deal more faith in
someone’s ability to pick a suspect out of a lineup than they should.
In Blink, I mentioned the research of Jonathan Schooler on lineups: he’s
showed that merely requiring people to write down a physical description of the
suspect before viewing the lineup radical impairs their ability to pick out the
correct person.
But the Duke case is an example of another, even more
problematic aspect of eyewitness identifications, and that is that we aren’t
particular good at making them across races. There is a huge amount
of psychological research in their area, pioneered by Roy Malpass at the
University of Texas at El Paso. A few years ago, John Brigham and
Christian Meissner did a big meta-analysis of all of the cross-racial
identification studies and concluded that given the task of picking someone out
of a lineup, the average person is something like 1.4 times more likely to
correctly identify an own-race face than a different-race face, and 1.6 times
more likely to incorrectly identify a different race face. These are
not trivial error rates. Clearly we need to treat cross-racial identifications
with a special level of caution. (Here’s the link to the UTEP eyewitness
laboratory: eyewitness.utep.edu/race.html)
The problem seems to be that
when we encounter someone from a different group we process them at the group
level. We code the face in our memory under the category black or
white, and not under the category of someone with, say, an oval face and brown
eyes and a prominent chin. Race, in other words, trumps other visual
features that would be more helpful in distinguishing one person from
another. Why do we do this? One idea is simply that it’s
a result of lack of familiarity: that the more we “know” a racial
type, the more sophisticated our encoding becomes. Another idea is that it’s a
manifestation of in-group/out-group bias. The thing about coding by
group and not by facial feature is that it’s a lot faster. And from
an evolutionary standpoint, you’d want to use quicker processing methodologies
in dealing with those who come from unfamiliar—and potentially
unfriendly—groups. The bottom line is that the adage that “all
blacks look the same” to whites (and all whites look the same blacks) has some
real foundation.
This has been a huge issue for years in white
identifications of black suspects. I would venture to guess that there are
thousands of African Americans in prison right now for crimes they didn’t
commit, largely because whites have far too much faith in their ability to tell
one black face from another. Now, in the Duke case, we have a black
identification of white suspects. The shoe is on the other foot. It
will be interesting to see whether the legal system is any more willing to
acknowledge the real limitations of eye-witness identifications when it is
suspects from the racial majority who are on the receiving end of the bias, not
the other way around.