Project description
Exploring culture-dependent variables in eyewitness memory
Living in a globalised society entails that eyewitnesses of serious crimes regularly provide testimony in cross-cultural settings. What happens when police investigators interview eyewitnesses from a different cultural background? How do different cultural groups encode, store and retrieve memories, and how are memory reports evaluated in immigration contexts? What can be said about the frequency, nature and legal consequences of culture-dependent variables in international criminal cases? The EU-funded WEIRD WITNESSES project aspires to answer these questions, to develop a culturally modulated theory of eyewitness memory and to design and test evidence-based interview guidelines. To achieve these goals, the project aims to integrate analyses of video, document and experimental data.
Objective
Our increasingly international society demands that eyewitnesses of serious crimes regularly provide testimony in cross-cultural settings, such as international criminal tribunals. This poses significant challenges for investigators and legal decision-makers. Errors in fact-finding may result in wrongful convictions and unjust acquittals. Yet, eyewitness memory research has predominantly focused on Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) witnesses.
The project addresses two key objectives: (1) develop culturally modulated theory of eyewitness memory and (2) design and test evidence-based interview guidelines.
In Subproject 1, I will examine what happens when police investigators interview eyewitnesses from a different cultural background. It will involve the systematic coding of culture-dependent variables in video-recorded police interviews with witnesses of serious crimes in South Africa, a society with many different subcultures.
In Subproject 2, I will analyse the frequency, nature and legal consequences of culture-dependent variables in international criminal cases. It will involve an empirical document analysis of eyewitness evidence provided at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and interviews with international legal scholars and practitioners.
In Subproject 3, I will assess how different cultural groups encode, store and retrieve memories, and how memory reports are evaluated in immigration contexts. It will involve a series of experiments in which the objective and perceived characteristics of statements provided by asylum seekers originating from Sub-Saharan Africa are compared to a matched Western control group.
The project integrates analyses of video, document and experimental data to provide insight into culture-dependent variables in eyewitness memory. The new theory will enable researchers and practitioners to steer away from the present WEIRD bias in legal psychology.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
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Funding Scheme
ERC-STG - Starting GrantHost institution
1081 HV Amsterdam
Netherlands