Repeated postevent questioning can lead to elevated levels of eyewitness confidence

Two experiments tested the proposition that postevent questioning can lead to later increases in witness confidence without corresponding changes in witness accuracy. After a staged interruption in a college classroom, participants were questioned about the event 5 times over 5 weeks in Experiment 1 (n=57) and 3 times over 5 days in Experiment 2 (n=79). During the final questioning session, the participant-witnesses consistently reported higher levels of confidence for those items that had been subject to repeated postevent questioning than for those items that were asked for the first time, yet there was no difference in the accuracy of the responses to the two sets of items. Additionally, in all conditions the participant-witnesses were generally overconfident in their responses. These results suggest that repeated postevent questioning can cause eyewitnesses' subsequent confidence estimates to be artificially inflated.     

Reviews

Roman Szporluk (ed.), National Identity and Ethnicity in Russia and the New States of Eurasia. New York and London: M.E. Sharpe, 1994, xiii + 328 pp., £40.00 h/b, £16.00 p/b.

Paul Kolstoe, Russians in the Former Soviet Republics. London: Hurst, 1995, xii + 340 pp., £35.00.

Ronald Grigor Suny, The Révenge of the Past. Nationalism, Revolution and the Collapse of the Soviet Union. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993, xix + 207 pp., £25.00 h/b, £10.95 p/b.

Ian Bremmer & Ray Taras (eds), Nations and Politics in the Soviet Successor States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, xxvii + 557 pp., £55.00 h/b, £17.95 p/b.

Charles A. Kupchan (ed.), Nationalism and Nationalities in the New Europe. Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1995, xi + 224 pp., £31.50 h/b, £11.95 p/b.

Christopher Williams, AIDS in Post‐Communist Russia and its Successor States. Aldershot: Avebury, 1995, xvi + 216 pp., £35.00.

Amin Saikal & William Maley (eds), Russia in Search of its Future. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, xii + 239 pp., £30.00 h/b, £10.95 p/b.

Marco de Andreis & Francesco Calogero, The Soviet Nuclear Weapon Legacy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995, x + 130 pp., £25.00.

Eva Haraszti‐Taylor, The Hungarian Revolution of 1956. A Collection of Documents from the British Foreign Office. London: Astra Press, 1995, xxxii + 404 pp., £5.95.

Julian Cooper, Maureen Perrie & E. A. Rees (eds), Soviet History, 1917–53: Essays in Honour of R. W. Davies. London and Basingstoke: St Martin's Press, 1995, xxviii + 273 pp. £45.00.

Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Sovetskoi Armii. Putevoditel’ v dvukh tomakh. Minneapolis: East View Publications, Vol. 1, v + 421 pp., Vol. 2, vi + 531 pp., 1991, 1993, £59.00.

Vladimir N. Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War: Political Parties and Social Movements in Russia, 1918–1922, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994, xiv + 455 pp.

Semion Lyandres, The Bolsheviks’ ‘German Gold’ Revisited: An Inquiry into the 1917 Accusations. Pittsburgh: Carl Beck Papers No. 1106, Center for Russian and East European Studies, University of Pittsburgh, 1995, 132 pp., no price.

Al Richardson (ed.), In Defence of the Russian Revolution: A Selection of Bolshevik Writings. 1917–1923. London: Porcupine Press, 1995, xvi + 287 pp., £12.99.

Neil Robinson, Ideology and the Collapse of the Soviet System. A Critical History of Soviet Ideological Discourse. Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1995, x + 227 pp., £45.00.

Alexsandras Shtromas (ed.), The End of “Isms"? Reflections on the Fate of Ideological Politics after Communism's Collapse. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995, 234 pp., £13.99.

Simon Tormey, Making Sense of Tyranny: Interpretations of Totalitarianism. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995, vi + 199 pp., £7.95.

David L. Hoffmann, Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow, 1929–1941. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994, xv + 282 pp., £26.95.

Heather Hogan, Forging Revolution: Metalworkers, Managers, and the State in St. Petersburg, 1890–1914. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993, xviii + 319 pp., £32.50.

Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer (ed.), Culture Incarnate: Native Anthropology from Russia. Armonk, New York, London: M.E. Sharpe, 1995, xii + 270 pp.

Michael D. Kennedy (ed.), Envisioning Eastern Europe: Postcommunist Cultural Studies. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1994, 249 pp., £30.00.

Blanche H. Gelfant, Cross‐Cultural Reckonings: A Triptych of Russian, American, and Canadian Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, x + 190 pp., £35.00.     

"Europe of the Regions" and the Federalization of Europe

There is a close connection between regionalism, federalism,and the movement to create a united federal Europe. The recentmovement to create a "Europe of the Regions" is one expressionof these connections. However, there are many kinds of regions,and certain forms of regional policy that may not necessarilybe an expression of either regionalism or European federalism.It might be said, nevertheless, that a "Europe of the Regions"is emerging in the weaker sense that, in today s Europe, significantchanges are taking place in the nature and functions of thenation-state. These changes are providing new opportunitiesfor regions to become more important policy actors in a widerEuropean context. The nation-state, however, is unlikely todisappear.     

Bilingualism revisited: or the confessions of a middle-aged and belated francophile

Abstract. The efforts to functionally bilingualize the federal public service over the past decade have generally attracted more jeers than cheers. In this rather personal article the author attempts to describe and defend his own role and that of the Public Service Commission in a major attempt at adult re-education.