Psychological studies and theories: eye-witnesses are not reliable

The impact of age and personality on eye-witness accounts

memories of both children and the elderly are less reliable than those of adults.

This is because children lack the vocabulary and schemas to understand what they have witnessed and are thus unable to articulate it to the police

, and the elderly may be more likely to be misled (Cohen and Faulkner, 1989), or use their schematic stereotypes to fill the gaps in their memory of events.

Roebers and Schneider (2010)

effect of intelligence on child eye-witnesses was positive (where higher intelligence lead to more reliable recall),

whereas shyness was negatively related to eyewitness recall

(shy children were less accurate than those who were not shy).

Reconstructive memory and post-event information

Bartlett (1932

although we think we remember accurately, we are continually trying to make sense of what is around us and our memories tend to be assimilated into existing schemas - known as ‘effort after meaning’.

The role of emotion in memory

Repression is the unconscious forgetting of traumatic events, feelings and thoughts because they are too anxiety provoking to remember.

These memories are repressed as part of an ego-defense mechanism, and they make the reliability of eye-witness accounts questionable.

Williams (1994

examined records of young women who had been treated for sexual abuse as children. Seventeen years later, 38% of them had no conscious recall of the abuse. Such processes make eye-witness testimony extremely unreliable.