10 - Misleading Information and Eyewitness Testimony Flashcards
What is eyewitness testimony?
The evidence supplied to the court by people who have seen a crime, based on their memory of the incident.
What are leading questions?
Questions that are phrased in such a way as to lead a witness to give a certain answer. This can contain misleading information that can distort original memory.
What did Loftus and Palmer do to explore leading questions and misleading information?
They showed 45 American students a film of a car crash and then asked them to estimate the speed that the cars were travelling at where they crashed.
Different verbs were used in the question, depending on the condition. The verbs were : contacted, hit, bumped, collided or smashed.
What were the results of Loftus and Palmers investigation?
Participants in the ‘contacted’ situation estimated the speed as 31mph but in the ‘smashed’ condition participants estimated the speed as 41mph.
A week later, they were asked if they had seen any broken glass ( there was none). 32% in the smashed condition reported seeing it, compared to only 12% in the control condition.
What do the results show?
Leading questions have a significant impact on what people recall and can change a persons entire memory of an event.
How does post - event discussion affect memory?
The memory of an event can be altered or contaminated through discussing events with others and / or being questioned multiple times.
What investigations have been done into the effects of post event discussion?
Gabbert et al put participants in pairs and got them to watch a different video of the same event so that they each got unique details.
In one condition the pairs were encouraged to discuss the event with one another before individually recalling the event.
In the other condition they did not discuss what they had seen.
71% of witnesses who had discussed the event went on to mistakenly recall details that they had not seen themselves but that they had learned of during discussion.
What are the advantages of misleading information?
Loftus and Zanni showed participants a video of car accident and then asked them 20 minutes later ‘ Did you see a broken headlight ‘ or ‘ did you see the broken headlight’. Only 7% in the ‘a’ condition said they had seen the broken headlight compared to the 17% in the ‘the’ condition.
Loftus found that 17% of participants who watched a film of a car drive and were asked how fast the cars were going when they passed the white barn, reported seeing the barn one week later, even tho there was no white barn.
College students who had visited Disneyland as a child were asked to evaluate the advertising material of Disneyland which contained misleading information about either bugs bunny or Ariel. A significant number of students reported having seen bugs bunny or Ariel at Disneyland when they were w child, despite thus being impossible. Bugs bunny is not a Disney character and Ariel was not a character when they were a child.
230 people in the USA who have been exonerated since the introduction of DNA evidence, 75% were convicted based on the evidence supplied inaccurate eyewitnesses.
What are they disadvantages of misleading information?
It is possible that leading questions only have an impact in the laboratory. Yuille and Cutshall found evidence of greater accuracy in eyewitness testimony in real life. Witnesses to an armed robbery in canards gave accurate reports of the crime 4 months after the event, even thought they had initially been asked two misleading questions.
People may not be as influenced to leading questions when they know that the answers they give are important. It was found that if participants thought they were watching a real life bank robbery, and also thought their responses would affect the trial, their identification of the robber was much more accurate than if they knew that the incident was staged.
