Don't it make my brown eyes blue: Co-witness misinformation about a target's appearance can impair target-absent line-up performance

Misinformation from another witness has been shown to impair eyewitness reports, but little is known about how it may influence eyewitness identification. In Experiment 1, adult pairs comprising one participant and one experimental confederate viewed a video clip of a staged theft. Half of the participants were then misinformed by the confederate that the thief's accomplice had blue eyes (in fact, they were brown). Next, individual participants described the accomplice and completed a target-absent photographic line-up task comprising blue-eyed members. Misinformed participants were several times more likely than controls to describe the accomplice as having blue eyes, and twice as likely to identify someone from the line-up. In Experiment 2, when line-up members’ eye colour was digitally altered from blue to brown, the line-up effect disappeared, suggesting that the increase in identifications in Experiment 1 was not a generalised increase in willingness to choose from the line-up. In Experiment 3, we discounted the possibility that discussion alone could account for the line-up misinformation effect, by subjecting all participants to co-witness discussion.