CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 InternationalPennekamp, PiaMansour, Jamal K.Batstone, Rhiannon2024-03-122024-03-122024-03-19Pennekamp, P., Mansour, J.K. and Batstone, R. (2024) ‘Variability in verbal eyewitness confidence’, Applied Cognitive Psychology, 38(2), p.e4190. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.4190.https://eresearch.qmu.ac.uk/handle/20.500.12289/13694https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.4190VoR added to repository 2024-03-19.Typically, an eyewitness' verbal confidence is used to judge the reliability of their lineup identification. Across three experiments (N = 3976), we examined eyewitnesses' own words confidence in their lineup decision. For identification decisions (n = 1099), we identified 781 quantitatively unique responses representing 132 qualitatively unique statements that could be categorized into low, medium, and high confidence. For rejectors (n = 781), we identified 599 quantitatively unique responses representing 143 qualitatively unique responses that could be categorized into low, medium, and high confidence. Most participants provided a verbal phrase (e.g., pretty sure) but a significant proportion—34.19% of identifiers and 29.05% of rejectors—provided numbers (e.g., 80%). The present data highlight the variability in how confidence is expressed. The criminal justice system would benefit from guidance for interpreting verbal confidence. We provide a picture of eyewitnesses' verbal confidence as a first step.en© 2024 The Authors. Applied Cognitive Psychology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Articlehttps://doi.org/10.1002/acp.4190