Asking an eyewitness to predict their later lineup performance could harm the confidence–accuracy relationship

Few studies have investigated eyewitnesses' ability to predict their later lineup performance, known as predecision confidence. We applied calibration analysis in two experiments comparing predecision confidence (immediately after encoding but prior to a lineup) to postdecision confidence (immediately after a lineup) to determine which produces a superior relationship with lineup decision accuracy. Experiment 1 (N = 177) featured a multiple-block lineup recognition paradigm featuring several targets and lineups; Experiment 2 featured an eyewitness identification paradigm with a mock-crime video and a single lineup for each participant (N = 855). Across both experiments, postdecision confidence discriminated well between correct and incorrect lineup decisions, but predecision confidence was a poor predictor of accuracy. Moreover, simply asking for predecision confidence weakened the postdecision confidence–accuracy relationship. This implies that police should exercise caution when interviewing eyewitnesses, as they should not be asked to predict their ability to make an accurate lineup decision.     

Who Are “We” – At the Limits of Rupture and Repair: Reply to Cyrus,Davids, and Swartz

Responding to these deeply thoughtful commentaries at a moment of urgency, in the United States and globally, around the impact of racial violence, this reply reflects on the limits and potential of psychoanalysis to address these vast social problems. I discuss the confrontation this moment entails for white people; the importance of resisting the urge to respond to this confrontation by “leaving” in any of the ways elaborated by Cyrus, Davids and Swartz (this issue); and the fantasies of control contained within the liberal idea of “giving up” privilege, as critiqued by Swartz. Drawing on the respondents’ insights, I revisit the psychoanalytic concept of rupture and repair and its limits within a context of ongoing structural violence; and reconsider how questions of agency and subjecthood are constructed in the idea of reparation, suggesting that what is in fact impossible may not be reparation itself, but reparation as an action of white people, seen as subjects, toward people of color, seen as objects.     

“When Reparation Is Felt to Be Impossible”: Persecutory Guilt and Breakdowns in Thinking and Dialogue about Race

This paper examines the problem of white liberal guilt from a Kleinian perspective, considering both the reparative potential of guilt in the depressive position, as well as the ways in which racial guilt can become diverted to an internal experience focused more on the self than on the harmed other, inspiring ways of thinking and acting that have little to do with repair. Drawing especially from the Kleinian concept of persecutory guilt, which describes the form guilt can take “when reparation is felt to be impossible”, I examine the consequences of white liberal guilt as expressed in the United States today. In particular, I argue that white liberal self-idealization and self-reproach – positions summarized as “this is not who we are” and “this is all that we are” – can function as two sides of a coin, grounded in splitting and in divergent yet related forms of exceptionalism. As an alternative, I propose thinking about reparation within the realm of the ordinary, and consider what this might entail.