Mock Juror Perceptions of Eyewitness Reports Given by Children with Intellectual Disabilities.
Telling jurors a child witness has an intellectual disability does not make the testimony seem less believable.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Researchers staged a fake trial online. Adults played jurors and watched a child testify.
Half the jurors were told the child had an intellectual disability. The other half got no label.
What they found
Jurors spotted lies about 56% of the time no matter what. The ID label did not hurt or help.
Ratings of how honest, believable, and accurate the child seemed stayed the same across groups.
How this fits with other research
Mruzek et al. (2019) meta-analysis says kids with ID are more suggestible and easier to plant false memories in. That sounds like bad news for court testimony.
Spriggs et al. (2016) found youth with Down syndrome recalled events just as well as mental-age peers and were no more suggestible. Memory accuracy can hold up.
The new study flips the lens: even if memory is shaky, jurors do not use the ID label as an excuse to discount the child. The label neither triggers extra doubt nor grants extra pity.
Why it matters
If you conduct forensic interviews, you can reassure lawyers and families that disclosing a child’s ID diagnosis will not automatically tank credibility. Jurors judged the content, not the label. Keep using best-practice supports like visual aids and either-or questions from Finney et al. (1995) to boost accuracy, but do not fear the disclosure itself.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Previous research suggests that an eyewitness credibility bias can arise when mock jurors are informed of a child's disability diagnosis. The aim of the present study was to examine mock jurors' lie-detection accuracy and credibility perceptions when assessing eyewitness testimonies provided by children diagnosed with an intellectual disability. Adult mock jurors (N = 217; half informed of the child's disability status) read four transcriptions from interviews with children (ages 10 to 15) diagnosed with an intellectual disability before evaluating the credibility and truthfulness of each eyewitness report. The mock jurors' lie-detection accuracy of the eyewitness reports produced by children with an intellectual disability (55.76%) was found to be similar to prior lie-detection research involving typically developing populations. Furthermore, there were no differences in the lie-detection accuracy and credibility ratings between mock-jurors who were informed of the child's disability when compared to those who were not informed. Although mock jurors perceived the children's testimony to have low credibility, they seemed reluctant to consider many of these testimonies to be false. The current findings also suggest that the disclosure of a disability may not independently cause worsened perceptions of child eyewitnesses.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2026 · doi:10.1080/1068316X.2020.1852564