Lay people's and police officers' attitudes towards the usefulness of perpetrator voice identification

Expert and lay knowledge of factors that affect the identification of a voice is an area of research that is still relatively unexplored. Much more research has focused on eyewitness identification and eyewitnesses' common knowledge. However, results from ‘eyewitnessing’ studies may not be directly applicable to ‘earwitnessing’. The present study examines how knowledgeable British lay people and police officers were concerning earwitness identification performance. One hundred nine participants (i.e. 49 lay people and 60 police officers) responded to a specially designed questionnaire. Results showed respondents to be more knowledgeable than expected, although police officers were no more knowledgeable than the general population. The existence of meta-knowledge is discussed in relation to previous studies.