Eyewitness testimony:misleading information

What is eyewitness testimony and misleading information ?

• eyewitness testimony is the ability of people to remember the details of events, such as crimes, that they themselves have observed

• Misleading information is incorrect information given to an eyewitness usually after the event. It can take many forms such as leading questions and post event discussion

Research on leading questions

Leading questions is when the wording of a question may lead you to give a certain answer

PROCEDURE- Loftus and Palmer arranged for 45 participants to watch clips of car accidents and then were asked leading questions on how fast the cars were travelling”how fast were the cars going when they hit each other”. The 5 groups of participants were given different verbs: contacted, hit, bumped, collided, and smashed.

FINDINGS- the mean speed was calculated for each participant group. The verb contacted resulted in a mean of 31.8 mph whereas the verb smashed resulted in a mean of 40.5 mph

Why do leading questions affect EWT?

1) Response bias- the wording of the question has no real effect on the participants memory, but just influences how they decide to answer

2)Substitution bias- proposes that the wiring of a leading question changes the participants memory. Loft us and Palmer conducted a 2nd experiment and found that participants who originally hear smashed were more likely to report broken glass(there was none) than those who heard hit

Research on post event discussion

Eyewitnesses to a crime may sometimes discuss their experiences and memories with each other

PROCEDURE- Gabbert studied participants in pairs. Each participant watched a video of the same crime but filmed from different points of view. Both participants discussed what the has seen before individually completing a recall test

FINDINGS- the researchers found that 71% of the participants mistakenly recalled aspects of the even that they did not see themselves but had picked up in the discussion. This is evidence of memory conformity

Why does post event discussion affect EWT?

1) Memory contamination- memories of the event altered or distorted because they combine information from other witnesses with their own memory

2) Memory conformity- witnesses go along with each other either to win social approval or because they believe the other witnesses are right

Evaluation

• one strength is of research into misleading information is that it has important practical uses on the criminal justice system- Loftus believes that leading questions can have a distorting impact on memory and so police officers need to be very careful about how they phantasy their questions

• One limitation of the memory conformity explanation is evidence that post event discussion actually alters EWT- Skagerberg and Wright showed their participants a film clip. There were 2 versions, in one the manager had dark brown hair and in the other one he had light brown hair. Participants discussed the clip in pairs but often did not repost what they had see or what they head from the co-witness (common answer to the hair question was ‘medium brown’ not light or dark

• One limitation of misleading information is that it uses artificial tasks, for example in Loftus and Palmer’s study , watching a video of a car crash is not the same as actually witnessing one in real life. Real witnesses may be affected by things like shock, fear or trauma which are not replicated in a controlled setting, therefore the external validity is limited as the study doesn’t reflect on emotions experienced in a real life crime and may not generalise well.

• One strength is that there is scientific credibility, both studies used lab experiments with high control over variables, this improves the internal validity and allows cause-and-effect relationships to be established. This supports the scientific status of cognitive psychology