Psychologist Gary Wells and colleagues published landmark research in 1996 demonstrating systemic flaws in traditional police line-up procedures used to gather eyewitness identification evidence across the United States. The research showed that double-blind administration of line-ups, sequential rather than simultaneous presentation of suspects, and witness confidence calibration significantly reduced false identifications. Wells's work, published in Law and Human Behavior, led to major reforms in police identification procedures across the US, UK, and internationally.

Wells's research exposed eyewitness memory — long the most valued form of human evidence in criminal proceedings — as profoundly unreliable. This finding resonated with post-modern literary and philosophical concerns about memory, testimony, and the construction of truth that had been building since the 1970s. The unreliable witness, always a narrative device in fiction, was now a forensically validated concept, with significant implications for how literary writers approached testimony, trauma, and the reconstruction of past events.