Misleading information

Eyewitness testimony

• The ability of people to remember the details of events, such as accidents and crimes, which they themselves have observed. The accuracy of it can be affected by factors such as misleading information and anxiety

Leading question

• A question which, because of the way it is phrased, suggests a certain answer.

Research on leading questions

• Loftus and Palmer (1974) arranged for 45 participants (students) to watch film clips of car accidents and then asked them questions about the accident. In the critical question (How fast were the cars going when they hit each other?) participants were asked to describe how fast the cars were travelling. There were five groups of participants and each group was given a different verb in the critical question. One group had the verb hit, the others had contacted, bumped, collided, smashed.

• The mean estimated speed was calculated for each participant group. The verb contacted resulted in a mean estimated speed of 31.8 mph. For the verb smterm-2ashed, the mean was 40.5 mph.

• The question biased the eyewitness's recall of an event

Post-event discussion

• Occurs when there is more than one witness to an event. Witnesses may discuss what they have seen with co-witnesses or with other people. This may influence the accuracy of each witness's recall of the event.

Research on post-event discussion

• Gabbert et al (2003) studied participants in pairs. Each participant watched a video of the same crime, but filmed from different points of view. This meant that each participant could see elements in the event that the other could not. Both participants then discussed what they had seen before individually completing a test of recall

• The researchers found that 71% of the participants mistakenly recalled aspects of the event that they did not see in the video but had picked up in the discussion

• The corresponding figure in a control group, where there was no discussion, was 0%. This was evidence of memory conformity

Evaluation- Strengths

• Real-world application:

• Loftus (1975) believes that leading questions can have such a distorting effect on memory that police officers need to be very careful about how they phrase their questions when interviewing eyewitnesses. Also, psychologists are sometimes asked to act as expert witnesses in court trials and explain the limits of EWT to juries.

• This shows that psychologists can help to improve the way the legal system works, especially by protecting innocent people from faulty convictions based on unreliable EWT

Strength

• Reliability - Loftus' research groups have conducted several studies into EWT and have regularly found similar results. The use of the lab experiments and controlled environments have allowed Loftus to exhibit high control over the variables making the research replicable and provide more confidence in the research findings.

Weakness

• Lacks Ecological Validity -criticised for being artificial i.e. using videos of car accidents is not the same as the real incident. It is difficult to reproduce real life EWT conditions in a lab for various practical and ethical issues. Real life incidents often take place unexpectedly and in an atmosphere of high tension. Foster found that if participants thought they were watching a real life robbery important to a real trial their identification of the robber was much more accurate than if they did not.

Weakness

• Contradictory real life research - Loftus' research has led to more real-life research into EWT. Yuile and Cutshall studied a real life crime and suggested the important information in real-life crime is not easily distorted - additionally, there is a weapons focus effect where people to tend to focus on the weapon rather than the other details.