Gender differences in eyewitness testimony.

One of the earliest empirical studies of sex differences in eyewitness behavior was that of William Stern (1903-1904). Stern's research furnished evidence in approbation of the long-held opinion that women's eyewitness testimony was less accurate and less resistant to the influence of misleading information than men's; however, Stern's 2 groups were not comparable in age. Other studies by Bringmann and colleagues in 1986 did not replicate Stern's findings using comparable age groups. The present investigation examined eyewitness behavior using two stimulus presentations of dissimilar content and complexity and tests for significance of gender differences. Subjects were 20 male and 20 female college students. No significant gender differences were found between groups on accuracy of recall or resistance to false information on the short-term memory task.