Wells has received many awards and honorary degrees, and he has gained recognition for his work and contributions to psychology and criminal justice.

Some of the most notable periodicals include: Wells has also appeared on many major television shows discussing his research findings and presenting new ideas and alternatives to help reduce the number of false convictions that occur because of the unreliability of eyewitnesses.

Some of his most notable appearances include: Wells began his career at the University of Alberta (Canada), and rose to the rank of full professor.

Currently, Wells is a distinguished professor of psychology at Iowa State University and the Stavish Chair in the Social Sciences.

In 2014, a report from a study committee the National Academy of Sciences endorsed the idea that all lineups should be conducted using double-blind procedures.

Estimator-variables are variables that are not under the control of the justice system, but are circumstantial factors that influence identification (e.g. age, race).

Wells argued that the rate of misidentifications are influenced by several methodological biases in the methods used by law enforcement to secure the identifications The system-variable versus estimator-variable distinction that Wells introduced in 1978 has so thoroughly permeated the nomenclature of the eyewitness literature that the terms are now commonly used without attribution to their source.

Wells' 35+ years of research on eyewitness misidentification and work performed with law enforcement and prosecutors has made substantial contributions to court and legal procedures.

His involvement with the Innocence Project and appearances he has made with Jennifer Thompson [1] have helped to inform the legal system about why 75% of all DNA exonerations of innocent people who were convicted by juries in the United States are cases involving mistaken eyewitness identification testimony.

Wells worked with many states, starting with New Jersey in 2002 and North Carolina in 2003, to implement state-wide reform of their eyewitness identification procedures.

Other states later followed in making reforms to eyewitness identification procedures based on the early models that Wells developed.

In agreement with the basic arguments in the Wells & Quinlivan article, the report from the study committee of the National Academy of Sciences endorsed the idea of casting out the Manson v. Braithwaite approach to evaluating the reliability of eyewitness identifications.

States such as New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Vermont, Illinois, and Connecticut, for example, now require double-blind lineups and other safeguards for eyewitness identification evidence that Wells advocated.

In 2003, the United States Court of Appeals 7th Circuit upheld Wells' testimony in a Chicago civil suit pertaining to lineup procedures in which the defendant was pardoned innocence after the allegation that the police officer induced the three witnesses to identify him as the perpetrator (Newsome vs. McCabe, 2003).

Double-bind photo-lineups using actual eyewitnesses: An experimental test of a sequential versus simultaneous lineup procedure.