Misleading information - Post Event Discussion

Question 1

AO1 misleading information - post event discussion

Answer 1

Fiona Gabbert
Two people watched the same

Hypothesis – Following Wright et al. (200) it was hypothesized

Participants – sixty students from the University

Simulated crime event video description

Procedure – a checklist containing 39 items of information about the sequence of actions and events that took place in the videos was constructed for scoring purposes. Free-recall data was coded according to whether it was a correct item of information, or an ‘extra’ item of information encountered from a co-witness

Content analysis (coding) – scored about whether it was correct, incorrect, or a piece of information from the co-witness

Findings
Accepting of or rejection of hypothesis – this confirms the hypothesis that witnesses will supplement their own memories of an event with information gained from a co-witness
71% recalled info they hadn’t seen
60% said girl was guilty despite not seeing her commit a crime

Conclusion and evidence of memory conformity effect – In conclusion, it is human nature for people to discuss their shared experiences especially if they concern something out of the ordinary such as witnessing a crime. However, as the present results clearly demonstrate, if witnesses discussed an event with one another then the police should take great care not to give undue weight to the consistency of their independent statements when judging their accuracy

Application to collection of eyewitness testimony

Memory contamination – memory gets contaminated with the other persons and they get mixed up
Memory conformity – simply saying it in order to conform

Question 2

what is memory contamination

Answer 2

Memory contamination – memory gets contaminated with the other persons and they get mixed up

Question 3

what is memory conformity

Answer 3

Memory conformity – simply saying it in order to conform

Question 4

AO3 misleading information - post even discussion

Answer 4

• A weakness of the memory conformity explanation is evidence that post-event discussion actually alters EWT
• For example, researchers showed their participants film clips, the mugger’s hair was dark brown in one and light brown in the other. Participants discussed the clips in pairs, each having seen different versions
• This is a weakness because they often did not report what they had seen in the clips or what they had heard from the co-witnesses, but a blend of the two like a common answer to the hair question was not ‘light brown’ or ‘dark brown’ but just brown, which reduces
• However, this could show that memory is reconstructive, not just unreliable
• Despite this, the memory itself is distorted through contamination by misleading post-event discussion, rather than the result of memory conformity
• Thus decreasing the validity of the research

Question 5

strengths of misleading info - post event discussion

Answer 5

reliability - findings are consistent to many similar research studies

applications - can be used by police officers for real crime scenes

Question 6

weaknesses of misleading information - post event discussion

Answer 6

validity - not the same as real life/mundane realism as it was under controlled nature/laboratory conditions plus wasn’t real so no one was going to suffer so not too important to ppts