Steve Penrod is a distinguished professor of psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. His education and career have led him to become an expert in the areas of psychology and law. He has contributed heavily to the field of psychology in the area of eyewitness memory, specifically the accuracy of eyewitness identification.

Education

Dr. Penrod received his B.A. in Political Science at Yale College in 1969. After this he studied at Harvard Law School and got his J.D. in 1974. He went on to receive his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Harvard University five years later in 1979. His dissertation was titled, “Evaluation of social scientific and traditional attorney methods of jury selection.”

Professional Experience

From 1971 to 1973, while Dr. Penrod was working towards his B.A. degree, he worked as a Legal Officer in a Naval Judge Advocate General Corps. He continued to do this until 1973. The next position he held was in 1979 when he became a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin directly after completing his Ph.D. at Harvard. He stayed at Wisconsin for ten years until 1989, when he became a professor of law, and an adjunct professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota. In 1995 he moved his career to the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. There he was not only a professor of psychology and law, but he was the program director for the law and psychology programs. In 2001 he switched to his current location and profession, a distinguished professor of psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

Yale College

• Political Science Honor Society
• NSF Summer Research Grant
• Griffin Scholarship
• Alcoa Scholarship

Harvard University

• National Science Foundation Dissertation
• Research Grand Law and Social Sciences

Post-Educational

• 1980—Co-winner of Society for the Psychological Study of Social
• 1980—Soc. for Experimental Social Psych Dissertation Award.
• 1980—Cattell Dissertation Award, NY Academy of Sciences.
• 1981—Second Prize American Psychological Association Division 13 Meltzer Research Award
• 1986—American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientific Award for an Early Career Contribution to Applied Psychology (Citation: American Psychologist, 42, 300-303).
• 1994-1995—Davis Professorship in Law, Univ of Minnesota
• 1999-2000—Gallup Professorship—University of Nebraska
• 1999—Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology and the Law—American Psychology-Law Society
• 2001—Distinguished Professorship, John Jay College, CUNY

Work/Studies

Most of Dr. Penrod's work has dealt with eyewitness studies. In one of his most commonly cited articles (according to Harzing), “Eyewitness Identification Procedures: Recommendations for Lineups and Photospreads,” he discusses the topic of eyewitness identification and recommends different techniques to help lower the chances of false identification. Examples of these include double-blind lineups, informing witnesses that the suspect may not even be present in the lineup, and choosing distractors carefully based on the witness's verbal description.

Another study, “Meta-analysis of facial identification studies” focuses on discovering what variables influence facial identification performance and what aspects of this topic should be further studied. Some variables that were found to affect performance were context reinstatement, target distinctiveness, elaboration at encoding, exposure time, cross-racial identification, and retention interval. He also did a study, “Choosing, confidence, and accuracy: A meta-analysis of the confidence-accuracy relation in eyewitness identification studies,” which deals with confidence of eyewitnesses. This study sought to discover the strength of correlation between confidence and accuracy for eyewitness identifying a suspect. It found that those who identified the correct suspect tended to have higher confidence levels than those who were incorrect.