Cognitive Psychology Key Question

Question 1

What is the Key Question?

Answer 1

• Is eyewitness testimony too unreliable to trust

Question 2

What is eyewitness testimoney?

Answer 2

• EWT is the information given by a witness after seeing an events or crime occurs, it is recorded in a police statement or given as a verbal testimony in a court trial
• EWT is often used to see if it matches forensic evidence, even though jurors may find forensic evidence hard to understand they may depend on the testimony given by a witness
• When there is no forensic evidence, the information given by a witness can be influential

Question 3

The scenario: The killing of Michael Brown

Answer 3

• Michael Brown is 18 year old black person who was confronted by a police officer named ‘Darren Wilson’
• After the confrontation Brown and his friends ran away from Wilson, ending with 6 shots hitting Brown in his front, killing him
• Wilson claimed to shoot Brown as an act of self defence however Wilson didn’t wear a body camera and there was no CCTV footage, so prosecutors relied on EWT
• After hearing different recollections of the crime, Wilson was stated as innocent as the different recollections led to different information

Question 4

Why is this an issue for society?

Answer 4

• According to the Innocence Project, 72% of 239 convictions were overturned through DNA testing because of faulty eyewitness
• 1/3 of these overturned cases rested on the testimony of two or more mistaken eyewitnesses

Question 5

How can the MSM explain faulty EWT?

Answer 5

• The MSM states that you need to pay attention to something for it to be transferred into the STM
• Eyewitnesses in the scene may of been paying attention to different things that was happening, such as what Michael Brown was doing, what the police officer was doing, what car the police officer was in or what was Michael Brown wearing
• This could lead to different being having different recollections of the event due to them paying attention to different details at the time
• The MSM also states that information be forgotten if there is retrieval failure where there is inability to access the stored memory and interference when a memory is disrupted by another memory
• Eyewitnesses may of failed to do maintenance rehearsal and lead to some of the information of the event to be forgotten such as whether Officer Wilson shot at Mr Brown out of nowhere, or had something happened
• There may of been interference where the individual may of gotten the crime scene mixed up with a crime scene that they read up in a newspaper and give mixed up information

Question 6

How can the Reconstructive model of memory explain faulty EWT?

Answer 6

• Schemas are parcels of information that stores our knowledge about the world based on our experience and they can help shape our expectation of events of people
  Eyewitnesses may of had a schema that due to the Daren Wilson being a white male police officer, he conducted police brutality so their recollection of the event would be affected by this schema
• Confabulation is where details are changed or added so that the story makes more sense to the person
  Eyewitness may of thought that due to Michael Brown being a young black male, they would of assumed that he was causing an issue due to this reasoning may of made sense for them
• Levelling is where memory is shortened, only leaving what your schema suggested are important
  Eyewitness may of thought what Mr Brown was doing was important and didn’t see what Officer Wilson was doing, so their recollections may of not made sense
• Rationalisation is where parts of the story are changed
  Eyewitness may of deemed that what Officer Wilson was wearing was more important than what he was doing leading to their recollection heavily basing on what he was wearing and not what he was doing per say