Debate

Introduction: Why is this a debate in psychology?

• Reliability of EWT is of huge importance in legal proceedings.

• Innocence project: works towards clearing the names of wrongly convicted prisoners & states EWT is the number one cause of wrongful convictions, leads to people going to prison for many years.

• Statistics: Eyewitness misidentifications have known to have played a role in over 70% of convictions, which have been overturned on the basis on DNA.

• This results in up to 100 innocent people being wrongly convicted each year of a violent or sexual crime in the UK.

• Therefore, it is vital that we understand how memory works, what can alter it, and how we can prevent this from happening.

Against EWT being reliable:

Eye witness testimony is not reliable post event information

Eye-witness testimony is NOT reliable:

• Post Event Information Loftus & Palmer’s (1974) Classic Evidence: One explanation offered for the inaccuracy of EWT is that questioning by the police after a crime, may alter a witness’s perception of the event and affect what they recall. Loftus and Palmer conducted research into the interaction between language and memory. They found that a leading question that suggests more damage can change a witness’s answer to that question. They gave two reasons for this: Response Bias Factors: Differences in speed estimates happen because the critical word (hit/smashed) biases a person's response. A The Memory Representation is altered: Some critical words would lead someone to have a perception of the event to be more serious that it was. The findings from experiment two suggest the effect of leading questions altered the participant’s memory of the event rather than being the result of response bias. In the 'smashed condition' this helped form a memory of an accident that appears quite severe and therefore generates the memory that there was likely to be broken glass.

• This suggests that memory is a complex event that is made up of two sources of information. 1) the perception of the original event and 2) additional external information. This suggests that whenever a witness is questioned, either by police, lawyers etc. their recollection of the event may actually be being distorted.

For EWT being reliable:

Eye witness testimony is reliable post event information

• Eyewitness research conducted in a laboratory is misleading as it tends to focus on details that are difficult to estimate, for example speed.

• Alternative research into the eyewitness testimony has been conducted by Yuille and Cutshall (1986) who tested the effect of leading questions on real life eyewitnesses. Yuille and Cutshall interviewed 13 people who had witnessed an armed robbery in Canada. The interviews took place four months after the robbery and included two misleading questions. The interviewees were not influenced by the misleading questions and gave accounts that were similar to those in their initial questioning. suggests that witnesses remember real events differently from staged events. Real life events often take place unexpectedly and in an atmosphere of tension and recollection of events is more resilient to distortion.

Against EWT being reliable:

Eye witness testimony is not reliable - crimes are emotive experiences

• Eyewitnesses may not be reliable because the crimes they witness are unexpected and emotionally traumatising.

• Freud argued that extremely painful or threatening memories are forced into the unconscious mind. This process, repression, is an ego-defence mechanism. Nowadays, psychologists might call this ‘motivated forgetting’, but in either form perhaps eyewitnesses are not reliable because the memory of the crime is too traumatising

For EWT being reliable:

Eye witness testimony is reliable - crimes are emotive experiences

• Some psychologists believe that when we experience events which are very emotionally shocking and/or which hold personal significance we create a particularly accurate and long-lasting memory called a flashbulb memory.

• There is evidence that the hormones associated with emotion, such as adrenaline, may enhance the storage of memories (Cahill & McGaugh, 1995). This suggests that the emotion surrounding a crime may lead to more, rather than less reliable memories.

Against EWT being reliable:

Eye witness testimony is not reliable - memory is reconstructive

A schema is a psychological representation of everything you know about an object, person or event. Schemas are packets of information that are built up through experience. Schemas for complex events often involve the idea of a script. A script of an event may distort our memory of that event. Bartlett found that we tend to reconstruct events for them to fit in with our existing schemas:

• We shorten or summarise events.

• We leave out details.

• We make the story more coherent (logical).

• We conventionalise the story so that it becomes more predictable.

The reason why this occurs is that we are constantly interpreting events/information to save ourselves cognitive time and energy so that they fit in with an existing schema.

• Yarmey (1993) asked 240 students to look at videos of 30 unknown males and classify them as ‘good guys’ or ‘bad guys’. There was high agreement amongst the participants, suggesting that there is similarity in the information stored in the ‘bad guy’ and ‘good guy’ schemas. In the same way preconceived ideas about the facial features of criminals may influence us when making decisions on suspects in a line-up or photo array. This suggests that eye-witnesses may not select the actual criminal, but the individual who looks most like a criminal.

For EWT being reliable:

Eye witness testimony is reliable - memory is reconstructive

For example, RapeCrisis reports that 90% of rapists know their victims. This means that the eyewitness’s ability to identify the assailant is likely to be very reliable, even when the crimes themselves are incredibly traumatic. Furthermore, as we can see in Yuille and Cutshall’s research, when research is conducted with eyewitnesses to real-life crimes (rather than laboratory-based crimes) their accuracy is much higher than that suggested by laboratory-based research. If memory was reconstructive, you would have expected the eyewitness recollections to have faded overtime and to have been susceptible to leading questions, however, this was not the case in Yuille & Cutshall’s research.

Ethical issues to go into mini conclusion/big

Rattner (1988) reviewed 205 cases of wrongful arrest and found that in 52% of cases this wrongful arrest was due to an eyewitness testimony. The Innocent Project claims that eyewitness misidentification is the single greatest cause of wrongful convictions in the USA, playing a role in more than 75% of convictions that were subsequently overturned through DNA testing. Inaccurate eyewitness testimonies can have very serious ethical consequences leading to wrongful convictions and in some cases to the death penalty.

Specific examples of innocent people who were wrongfully convicted and sent to prison based on EWT include: Ronald Cotton – he was found guilty of rape and sentenced to life in prison after the victim Jennifer Thompson, identified him. It took the use of DNA evidence to exonerate him; he spent 11 years in prison.

As well as ethical costs to the wrongfully accused, (many have ultimately lost years of their lives behind bars and being wrongfully imprisoned can have devastating effects on an individual’s psychological wellbeing), there is also the economic implication. The cost of a retrial and compensation to those who have been wrongfully convicted can be vast; recent estimates indicate the cost of crime in the UK is as much as £124 billion per year. However, for many, the most worrying implication of a wrongful testimony which leads to a wrongful conviction, is that the real perpetrator is allowed to remain free and therefore able to offend again.

Conclusion

It is difficult for psychologists to prove that eyewitnesses are or are not reliable. This area of research has been helpful in that it has led us to be more critical of the recollection of eyewitnesses. Many of the studies into the accuracy of eyewitnesses are laboratory experiments conducted on students; the findings therefore lack population and ecological validity. However, eyewitness accounts are now less susceptible to distortion using the Cognitive interview, an interviewing technique that has been developed to increase the amount and accuracy of information recalled. Nonetheless the reliability of eyewitnesses can be so poor that no conviction should be made if the only evidence is an eyewitnesses’ testimony.