Unconscious transference and mistaken identity: When a witness misidentifies a familiar but innocent person from a lineup

nconscious transference occurs when an eyewitness to a crime misidentifies a familiar but innocent person from a police lineup. In theory this happens because the witness has seen the innocent person at some point before or after the crime, and when he or she is encountered in the lineup the witness associates the familiarity elicited by the innocent person's presence with the crime. In this study 335 college students watched a film of a robbery. Subjects assigned to the transference condition saw an innocent bystander in the film, and subjects assigned to the control condition saw the same film but it did not contain the innocent bystander. When asked to identify the assailant from a lineup that contained the bystander without the assailant, transference subjects were three times more likely to misidentify the bystander than were control subjects (60.9% versus 21.9%, p...