EWT: Misleading Info Flashcards
Loftus & Palmer - Leading Questions
Procedure:
1) 45 participants (students) watched film clips of car accidents and then answered questions about speed. Critical question: ‘About how fast were the cars going when they hit each other?’
2) Five groups of participants, each given a different verb in the critical question: hit, contacted, bumped, collided or smashed.
Loftus & Palmer - Findings
1) The verb ‘contacted’ produced a mean estimated speed of 31.8 mph. For the verb ‘smashed’, the mean was 40.5 mph.
2) The leading question (verb) biased eyewitness recall of an event. The verb ‘smashed” suggested a faster speed of the car than ‘contacted’.
Why Leading Questions Affect EWT
1) Response-bias - Wording of a question has no enduring effect on an eyewitness’s memory of an event, but influences the kind of answer given.
2) Substitution - Wording of a question does affect eyewitness memory, it interferes with the original memory, distorting its accuracy.
Gabbert et al - Post-Event Discussion
PROCEDURE
1) Paired participants watched a video of the same crime, but filmed so each participant could see elements in the event that the other could not.
2) Both participants discussed what they had seen on the video before individually completing a test of recall.
Gabbert et al - Findings
1) 71% of participants wrongly recalled aspects of the event they did not see in the video but had heard in the discussion.
Control group - there was no discussion and no subsequent errors —> This was evidence of memory conformity.
Why Does Post-Event Discussion Affect EWT
1) Memory Contamination - When co-witnesses discuss a crime, they mix (misinformation) from other witnesses with their own memories.
2) Memory Conformity - Witnesses go along with each other to win social approval or because they believe the other witnesses are right.
STRENGTH of Explanation
REAL-WORLD APPLICATION TO CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM
1) The consequences of
inaccurate EWT are
serious. Loftus (1975)
argues police officers
should be careful in
phrasing questions to witnesses because of distorting effects.
2) Psychologists are sometimes expert witnesses in trials and
explain limits of EWT
to juries.
—> Therefore psychologists
can improve how the legal system works and protect the innocent from faulty convictions based on unreliable EWT.
LIMITATION of Substitution Explanation
COUNTER EVIDENCE
1) Sutherland and Hayne (2001) found their pps recalled central details of an event better than
peripheral ones, even when asked misleading questions.
2) This is presumably cause their attention was focused on the central features and these memories were relatively resistant to misleading
info.
—> Therefore the original
memory of the event survived and was not distorted, which is not predicted by the substitution explanation.
LIMITATION of Explanation
EVIDENCE DOESN’T SUPPORT MEMORY CONFORMITY
1) Skagerberg and Wright’s (2008)
participants discussed film clips they had seen (in one version the mugger had dark brown hair and the other light brown).
2) The pps recalled a ‘blend’ of
what they had seen and what they had heard from their
co-witness, rather than one or the other (e.g. said hair was ‘medium brown’).
—> This suggests that
the memory itself is distorted through contamination by post-event discussion and is not the result of memory conformity.
EXTRA EVALUATION
DEMAND CHARACTERISTICS
1) Lab studies give researchers high control over variables (high internal validity), so they can demonstrate that misleading post-event information causes inaccurate EWT.
2) But lab experiments suffer from demand characteristics - participants want to help so they guess when they can’t answer a question (low internal validity).
—> Therefore to maximise internal validity researchers should reduce demand characteristics by removing the cues that participants use to work out the hypothesis.
