Differential impacts of investigation and witness delays on layperson perceptions of witness credibility.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: Prior research has reported a consistent negative impact of delayed disclosure on sexual assault complainants' perceived credibility. The present studies investigated the impact of delay in new contexts. HYPOTHESES: Only when a delay was a result of a witness's actions would it negatively impact credibility. Any delay would decrease convictions and guilt likelihood ratings. METHOD: Study 1a (N = 412; Mage = 20.13 years; 60.00% women; 31.70% Caucasian; 3 [delay: 1 day, 2 years, 15 years] × 4 [report consistency: consistent, contradiction, omission, reminiscence]) examined the impact of an investigation delay and report inconsistencies on witness credibility in a physical assault case. Participants watched a witness's report, rated their credibility, and made legal decisions (e.g., verdict). Study 1b (N = 240; Mage = 19.67 years; 71.55% women; 28.75% Caucasian; 2 [delay: 1 day, 2 years] × 3 [report inconsistency: contradiction, omission, reminiscence]) partially replicated Study 1a. Study 2 (N = 200; Mage = 33.94 years; 45.50% women; 65.48% Caucasian; no reason-no delay, no reason-delay, witness-delay, investigation-delay) and Study 3 (N = 363; Mage = 34.65 years; 50.14% women; 53.17% Caucasian; 2 [delay: immediate, 2 years] × 3 [contextual information: no details, witness, investigation]) explored how the reason for the delay (i.e., witness or investigation) impacted credibility and legal decisions. RESULTS: Studies 1a and 1b found no impact of delay on witness credibility, but a delay resulted in reduced likelihood of guilt in Study 1a. Study 2 showed that only a witness-delay negatively impacted credibility. Any explained delay reduced guilt ratings and, for an investigation-delay, convictions, relative to no delay. Study 3 demonstrated only an effect of contextual information on honesty, suggesting negative views of witness reluctance at any delay. Any delay led to fewer convictions. CONCLUSION: Witness behavior, regardless of delay, may negatively impact their perceived credibility, whereas a delay outside of the witness's control might not. Delays also impact legal decisions. This work provides important new insight into how delays may be treated in the justice system. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".