Cognitive - Comp debate Flashcards
Give an intro to an essay on EWT
Eye witness testimony has been found to be one of the strongest and most compelling types of evidence used in a court of law.
However, numerous wrongful convictions in prominent cases such as Ronald Cotton as well as opposing statistic, such as that 70% of wrongful convictions are because of EWT have led many people to question if eye witness testimony are reliable and if they should be used as evidende in criminal trials.
In this essay I plan to examine whether or not EWT can be trusted..
Give an intro to the first of three points on leading questions
One piece of evidence that would suggest EWT is unreliable is the affect of leading questions how much the question itself can influence our perception, this has been highlighted in many studies.
Give evidence of the effect of leading questions on EWT and give a mini-conclusion to what this shows
For example in Loftus and Zanni (1975) participants were shown a car accident film. One group was asked if they saw ‘a’ broken headlight. Which just 7% wrongly recalled seeing, while a different group was asked a similar question of if they saw ‘the’ broken headlight which increased this number to 17%.
Therefore this would suggest that eye witness testimony are unreliable as the way the question is asked can have huge influence on our answer as just subtle word change increased the amount recalled by 10% which could have huge significance in a court case when dealing with EWT and questioning from police.
Give an intro to a counteragument that EWT’s are unreliable due to the effects of leading questions
However, a counterargument to this point would be that in Loftus and Zanni (evidence for leading questions), while the leading word change did significantly increase the amount of people wrongly remembering seeing a headlight, its important to remember that even with this leading question, 83% of people still correctly remember that there was no headlight present.
This shows that EWT are in-fact accurate and leading questions only affect a very small number of people. This is supported by other studies for example.
Give a peice of evidence that supports the idea that leading questions do not influence EWT
Loftus (1979) had participants being shown pictures of a man stealing a women’s red purse from her bag. Upon examination, even with leading questions trying to alter their memory, 98% of people still correctly recalled that the purse being stolen was red.
Therefore, this disproves the idea that EWT is unreliable due to leading questions as they only affects a tiny number of people and suggests we should trust EWT.
Give a mini-conclusion for leading questions eval point
Overall, while in a court case this evidence would suggest EWT may not be accurate 100% of the time, it does illustrate that EWT is usually extremely accurate.
Aditionally, due to this topic of research, methods have been made to increase the accuracy of EWT. For example cognitive interviews have been adopted by the police. This interviewing technique has been proven to nullify the affects of leading questions and increases the reliability and validity of EWT
Give a introduction to a point on EWT in relation to schema’s
Another piece of evidence that would suggest EWT is unreliable is concept of schemas.
Schemas can affect memory as they are packets of infomation of what we think of in association to a specific word. For instance, what comes to mind when we think of a ‘criminal’ could be a man in a mask, but this might not always be accurate and reflect reality and may instead incorrectly fill in gaps in our memory when trying to recall events. This can lead to inaccurate EWT’s.
Give research evidence to schemas showing EWT’s are unreliable
For example in Yarmey (1993). In this study, 240 students were asked to look a videos of 30 unknown males and classify them as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ guys based on their appearence alone. The results showed that there was a huge amount of agreement amongst all the participants of who was ‘good’ or ‘bad’ simply based off their looks.
Therefore this suggests EWT is unreliable because we already have set ideas of what a certain type of person will look like, however these thoughts / schemas are often not true and may result in someones EWT being inaccurate as they may be naming the person who fits into their schema of a criminal rather than the actual criminal,.
This has important social implications as it shows criminals can be easily be wrongly identified just from the way they look, which occurred in cases such as Ronald Cotton who was wrongfully committed based on an EWT and was in prison for over a decade.
Give a full counter argument to schemas making EWT unreliable. (intro - point - mini - conclusion)
However, a counterargument to this study is that it is unreliable and not generalisable to a population and therefore the results can be not used to deem EWT as inaccurate.
This is because of weaknesses in the study. For instance the study lacks ecological validity this is because its done in an artificial environment which lacks the emotion people would feel in a real EWT of a criminal case.
Aditionally, the participants used in the study lack generalisabiliy, this is because they are all students and from the same university, this is not reflective of an overall population and therefore, the results cannot be applied to them.
Therefore, this would suggest that while the results may show schemas can influence an EWT, the participants are too ungeneralisable for the results to be applied around the world to EWT cases.
Give a mini-conclsion at the end of the point about schemas
Overall, while schemas definitely may impact our perception of who is and isn’t criminal, weaknesses in research done on this topic make it hard to conclusively say the extent of this impact in EWT clases across the world.
Give an introduction and point to EWT being unreliable due to research made by Freud
Another piece of evidence that would suggest that EWT is unreliable is the theories of Freud involving unexpected, traumatic events.
For example, Freuds argues that extremely painful or threatening memories are forced deep into our unconscious mind using the process of repression due to our ego defence mechanism.
Freud argues that the only way of uncovering these repressed, traumatic memories is through therapies such as Dream analysis.
Therefore, this would suggest that EWT is unreliable as in EWT’s the events the defendant are recalling are often extremely emotionally traumatising experiences (e.g ronald cotton EWT) which Freud would argue would be pushed into their unconscious mind leading to them not being able to accurately recall key information about what happened.
Give a full counterarugment to the idea that EWT are unreliable due to fredian theories
However a counterargument to this point would be alternative evidence from peoples experiences of traumatic evidence would suggest the oppiste, in that traumatic memories are not repressed into our subconscious and we may in-fact be able to recall them with increased accuracy.
For example the concept of ‘flashbulb memories’ states that when people go through extremely emotionally traumatic events, such as the ones being recalled in EWT’s, our awareness heavily increased to instinctively increase our chances of survival. This concept was seen in the study of
Therefore this would suggest that Freud’s theories are incorrect and that EWT’s are in-fact reliable as the type of events that trigger flashbulb memories are the exact same kind being recalled in EWT making them highly accurate.
Mini conclusion to freudian theories in EWT
Overall, while there may be some truth to Freud’s theories for some individuals, in modern day they are largely outdated and alternative research would instead suggest we should trust EWT as the events recalled will be highly memorable as they are out of the ordinary.
Give a conclsuion to the essay on EWT
In conclusion, while evidence suggests that EWT is largely reliable in the significant majority of cases. It is undenianble that alternative factors such as the role of schema’s and reconstructive memory can slightly influence our perception.
While this may only be for a select few people, and EWT will still be accurate the majorty of the time, the few inaccuracies lead to huge social implications such as a wrongful conviction of someone completely innocent.
This means it is essential that we use other evidence alongside EWT for a conviction and cases such as Ronald Cotton support this, as it illustrates the huge damages of just one wrong recollection of EWT.
