7. factors affecting EWT: misleading information Flashcards
RESEARCH ON LEADING QUESTIONS
Leading questions are a particular issue for eyewitness testimony (EWT) because police questions may ‘direct’ a witness to give a particular answer.
what is a leading question?
a question which, because of the way it os phrased, suggests a certain answer.
RESEARCH ON LEADING QUESTIONS
LOFTUS AND PALMER
PROCEDURE:
Loftus and Palmer arranged for 45 participants to watch film clips of car accidents and then asked them questions about the accident.
In the critical question (a leading question) participants were asked to describe how fast the cars were travelling:
About how fast were the cars going when they hit/ bumped/ smashed / contacted / collided each other?’
There were five groups of participants, and each group was given a different verb in the critical question.
RESEARCH ON LEADING QUESTIONS
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.
RESEARCH ON LEADING QUESTIONS
FINDINGS:
the mean estimated speed was calculated for each group:
· The verb contacted resulted in a mean estimated speed of 31.8 mph.
· For the verb smashed, the mean was 40.5 mph.
The leading question biased the eyewitness’s recall of an event.
RESEARCH ON LEADING QUESTIONS
Loftus and Palmer conducted a second experiment that supported the SUBSTITUTION EXPLANATION, which proposes that
describe the experiment and explain the term
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.
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 misinformation from other witnesses with their own memories.
RESEARCH ON POST-EVENT DISCUSSION
Eyewitnesses to a crime may sometimes discuss their experiences and memories with each other.
PROCEDURE:
Gabbert et al. 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
RESEARCH ON POST-EVENT DISCUSSION
Gabbert 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.
RESEARCH ON POST-EVENT DISCUSSION
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.
AO3: strength of MISLEADING INFORMATION
practical application - justice system
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 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.
RESEARCH ON POST-EVENT DISCUSSION
AO3: limitation of MISLEADING INFORMATION
counterpoint - lab studies (Foster)
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, Foster et al. 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.
AO3: limitation of MISLEADING INFORMATION
contradicting evidence for memory conformity - Wright
Another limitation of the memory conformity explanation is evidence that post-event discussion actually alters EWT.
Wright showed 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.
