After growing up in Canada, Steve Charman moved to
the midwest United States and received his Ph.D. in social psychology from Iowa
State University. He joined the FIU faculty in 2006, where he researches the
underlying cognitive processes of eyewitnesses and how the legal system can
improve eyewitness performance through the development of new lineup procedures.
He has also recently begun researching how crime suspects generate alibis (and
how those alibis are subsequently evaluated), as well as the forensic usefulness
of facial composites. He hopes that his work will help improve the accuracy of
criminal trial verdicts, which, as recent DNA exoneration cases have shown, can
be tragically mistaken.
Representative
Publications
Charman, S. D. & Wells, G. L. (in press). Applied lineup
theory. In R. C. L. Lindsay, D. Ross, D. Read, & M. Toglia (Eds.),
Handbook of Eyewitness Psychology. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Charman, S. D. & Wells, G. L. (in press). Eyewitness lineups: Is the
appearance-change instruction a good idea? Law and Human Behavior.
Wells, G. L., Charman, S. D., & Olson, E. A. (2005). Building face composites
can harm lineup identification performance. Journal of Experimental
Psychology: Applied, 11, 147-156.
Wells, G. L., Olson, E. A., & Charman, S. D. (2003). Distorted retrospective
eyewitness reports as functions of feedback and delay. Journal of
Experimental Psychology: Applied, 9, 42-52.