eyewitness testimony and misleading information Flashcards
(13 cards)
introduction
When you are asked a question, the wording of the question may lead (or mislead) you to give a certain answer. This is a particular issue for eyewitness testimony (EWT) because police questions may ‘direct’ a witness to give a particular answer. In the experiment below words such as smashed or bumped were used to suggest the speed of the car.
eyewitness testimony
Refers to an account, given by people, of an event they have witnessed. For example they may be required, at trial, to give a description of a robbery or a road accident someone has seen
misleading information
Incorrect information given to an eyewitness usually after the event, which can distort what people remember about an event.
-leading questions
-post event discussion
leading questions
Leadings questions are questions that are phrased in such a way that they imply / lead us to a specific answer.
Investigated by Loftus and
Palmer
loftus and palmer
Procedure Elizabeth Loftus and John 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 (a leading question or also called misleading information) participants were asked to describe how fast the cars were travelling: About how fast were the cars going when they hit each other?’ 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.
Findings 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 smashed, the mean was 40.5 mph (full findings on facing page). The leading question biased the eyewitness’s recall of an event.
why leading questions affect us
The response-bias explanation suggests that the wording of the question has no real effect on the participants’ memories, but just influences how they decide to answer. When a participant gets a leading question using the word smashed, this encourages them to choose a higher speed estimate.
Loftus and Palmer (1974) conducted a second experiment that supported the substitution explanation, which proposes that the wording of a leading question changes the participant’s memory of the film clip. This was shown because participants who originally heard smashed were later more likely to report seeing broken glass (there was none) than those who heard hit. The critical verb altered their memory of the incident.
post event discussion
When there is more than one witness to an event, and these discuss what they have seen with each other, or with other people.May influence accuracy of each witnesses recall of the event.
• Investigated by Gabbert et al.
(2003)
Gabbert et al
Eyewitnesses to a crime may sometimes discuss their experiences and memories with each other. The following experiment explores the effects of such post-event discussion (PED).
Procedure Fiona 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. For example, only one of the participants could see the title of a book being carried by a young woman.
Both participants then discussed what they had seen before individually completing a test of recall.
Findings 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.
why does PED affect us
One explanation is memory contamination. When co-witnesses to a crime discuss it with each other, their eyewitness testimonies may become altered or distorted. This is because they combine (mis)information from other witnesses with their own memories.
Another explanation is memory conformity. Gabbert et al. concluded that witnesses often go along with each other, either to win social approval or because they believe the other witnesses are right and they are wrong. Unlike with memory contamination, the actual memory is unchanged.
strength-real world application
One strength of research into misleading information is that it has important practical uses in the criminal justice system.
The consequences of inaccurate EWT can be very serious. 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. 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.
counterpoint-real world application
Counterpoint However, the practical applications of EWT may be affected by issues with research. For instance, Loftus and Palmer’s participants watched film clips in a lab, a very different experience from witnessing a real event (e.g. less stressful). Also, Rachel Foster et al. (1994) point out that what eyewitnesses remember has important consequences in the real world, but participants’ responses in research do not matter in the same way (so research participants are less motivated to be accurate).
This suggests that researchers such as Loftus are too pessimistic about the effects of misleading information - EWT may be more dependable than many studies suggest.
limitation-evidence against substitution
One limitation of the substitution explanation is that EWT is more accurate for some aspects of an event than for others.
For example, Rachel Sutherland and Harlene Hayne (2001) showed participants a video clip. When participants were later asked misleading questions, their recall was more accurate for central details of the event than for peripheral ones. Presumably the participants’ attention was focused on central features of the event and these memories were relatively resistant to misleading information.
This suggests that the original memories for central details survived and were not distorted, an outcome that is not predicted by the substitution explanation.
limitation-evidence challenging memory conformity
Another limitation of the memory conformity explanation is evidence that post-event discussion actually alters EWT.
Elin Skagerberg and Daniel Wright (2008) showed their participants film clips. There were two versions, e.g. a mugger’s hair was dark brown in one but light brown in the other. Participants discussed the clips in pairs, each having seen different versions. They often did not report what they had seen in the clips or what they had heard from the co-witness, but a ‘blend’ of the two (e.g. a common answer to the hair question was not ‘light brown’ or dark brown’ but ‘medium brown’).
This suggests that the memory itself is distorted through contamination by misleading post-event discussion, rather than the result of memory conformity.
s-research conducted in highly controlled, experimental settings-enables control of extraneous variables so that cause and effect can be established, allows experiment to be replicated to assess reliability of findings
