Cognitive - Debate Flashcards
(11 cards)
Reliability of EWT
> Post-event information
Crimes are emotive experiences
Child witnesses
Reconstructive memory
Not Reliable - Post-event Information
- Loftus and Palmer research - easy to influence people’s memory with post-event information as it becomes incorporated into the original memory
- Those who were asked ‘did you see the broken glass’ were more likely to say they did compared to those who weren’t exposed to a question
Reliable - Post-event information
- Not all research suggest post info is misleading
- Loftus - showed participants slides of man stealing large, bright red purse from woman - they were later exposed to info containing subtle errors and obvious one (purse brown) - 98% remembered it was red
- recollection for central or key details may be more resistant to distortion from post-event information
Not reliable - crimes are emotive experiences
- the crimes are unexpected and emotionally traumatising experience
- Freud - these memories are dealt with through the processes of ego-defence mechanisms such as repression which can effect on the memory
- ‘motivated forgetting’
Reliable - Crimes are emotive experiences
- Some psychologists believe - when we experience events that are emotionally shocking and which hold personal significance we create a particularly accurate, long-lasting memory (flashbulb memory)
- Cahill and McGaugh - hormones associated with emotion, adrenaline, enhance the storage of memories
- Lead to a more reliable memory
Not Reliable - Child witnesses
Pozzulo and Lindsay (1998) meta-analysis -looked into numerous studies that have been made and data collected.
* less reliable:more sensitive - when they were given a line-up of people and told to identify the target they feel that they have to give an answer, even if this means an incorrect answer.
* children under 5 years old were less likely to identify the target correctly and children 5-13 didn’t differ significantly from adults but they were more likely to give an answer even when the target wasn’t part of the line-up.
* Prone to fantasy, could exaggerate, easier to influence on
Reliable - Child witnesses
- Davies et al came to the conclusions that children between 6 and 7, and 10 and 11 don’t tend to fantasize and make things up, don’t deliberately lie when giving testimony, their memory for important details is not significantly altered by adult suggestion, leading to a fairly accurate testimony.
- Anastasi and Rhodes - all age groups tend to give a more accurate report if the target is the same age
- If child observed a child commiting a crime it would be more reliable
Not Reliable - Memory is reconstructive
- Information that is already held in our schemas could influence our memory of the crime.
- built up a perception of the characteristics of a criminal based upon films and news reports or things they have seen in the past = inaccurate recall, as they become incorporated in memory
Yame
* 240 students looked at videos of 30 unknown males and classify them as good or bad
* high agreement amongst participants suggesting similarity in info stored in ‘bad and good guy’ schema.
Reliable - Memory in reconstructive
- many crimes witnesses knows the perpetrator = don’t need to refer to schemas
- RapeCrisis - 90% rapists ar known by victims
- Eyewitnesses are able to identify them even if it was very traumatic
- Yuille and Cutshall - accuracy is much higher in real life than suggested by laboratory-based research
- if memory was reconstructive you would have expected memory to fade over time.
Ethical, Social, economic implications
> Unreliable eye-witness reports can lead to additional and substantial economic costs for the judicial system in the form of re-trial costs and compensation payouts to those wrongly convicted due to unreliable eye-witness testimony.
unreliable EWT can have a major impact on the person that is wrongfully convicted = could mean that the criminal remains free and could be a risk to society.
Conclusion
DIfficult to prove if they are reliable or not
Area of research helpful - led to be more critical of the recollection of EWT
>developed other methods - cognitive interviews, sequential line-ups.
