EWT: Misleading Information Flashcards
Leading Questions
Description
- The wording of a question may lead a person to give a certain answer.
- This is an issue for EWT as police may ‘direct’ a witness to give a particular answer.
Leading Questions
Procedure
Loftus and Palmer (1974)
- 45 participants watch a film of a car accident and are asked questions about it.
- Participants were asked to describe the speed of the car (‘how fast were the cars going when they hit each other’).
- “Hit” was the verb exchanged for others in different conditions.
Leading Questions
Findings
Loftus and Palmer (1974)
- The mean estimated speed was calculated for each group.
- The verb ‘contacted’ gave a mean speed of 31.8mph.
- The verb ‘smashed’ gave a mean speed of 40.5mph.
- The leading question biased the eyewitness’s recall of an event.
Leading Questions
Effect on EWT
Loftus and Palmer
- ‘Response-bias explanation’ suggests that the wording of the question only influences how the person decides to answer.
- The word ‘smashed’ encourages them to choose a higher speed estimate.
- Loftus and Palmer (1974) conducted a second experiment which supported the ‘substitution explanation’.
- This was the idea that the wording of a question changes the participant’s memory of the film clip.
- Shown by the participants who originally heard ‘smashed’ later reported seeing broken glass even though there was none.
- The critical verb altered their memory of the incident.
Post-event Discussion
Procedure
Gabbert (2003)
- Gabbert studied participants in pairs.
- Each participant watched a video of the same crime but filmed from different POVs.
- This meant that each participant could see elements in the video that others could not.
- For example, only one participant could see the title of a book being carried by a young woman.
- Participants then discussed what they had seen, and individually completed a test of recall.
Post-event Discussion
Findings
Gabbert (2003)
- Researchers found that 71% of the participants mistakenly recalled aspects of the event that they did not see, but had picked up in the discussion.
- The corresponding figure in the control - where there was no discussion - was 0%.
- This was evidence of memory conformity.
Post-event Discussion
Effect on EWT
- An explanation is memory contamination.
- When co-witnesses of a crime discuss it with each other, their EWT may be altered or distorted.
- This is because they combine (mis)information from other witnesses with their own memories.
- Another explanation is memory conformity.
- Witnesses often go along with each other, either to gain social approval or because they believe the other witnesses are right and they are wrong.
- Unlike memory contamination, their actual memory is unchanged.
Misleading Information: Evaluation
Real-world Application
Strength
- Research into misleading information has important practical uses in the criminal justice system.
- Consequences of EWT can be serious.
- Loftus suggests that leading questions can have such a distorting effect on memory that police officers must be very careful how they question witnesses.
- Psychologists are sometimes asked to act as expert witnesses in court trials to explain the limits of EWT to juries.
This shows that psychologists can help to improve the way the justice system works and help protect innocent people from faulty prosecution by unreliable EWT.
Misleading Information: Evaluation
Counterpoint
(Real-world Application)
- The practical applications may be affected by issues with research.
- For instance, Loftus and Palmer had their participants watched film clips in a lab, a very different experience to witnesses a real life event (e.g. less stressful).
- Foster (1994) pointed out that eyewitnesses remember what has important consequences in the real world.
- However, participants responses don’t matter in that way so they’d be less motivated to be accurate.
This suggests that researchers may be too pessimistic about the effects of misleading information - EWT may be more reliable than research suggests.
Misleading Information: Evaluation
Evidence Against Substitution
Limitation
- The substitution explanation is more accurate for some aspects of an event than others.
- Sutherland and Hayne (2001) showed participants video clip.
- When participants were later asked misleading questions, their recall was more accurate for central details of the event than for peripheral ones.
- Presumably, participants’ attention was focused on the central features of the event and these memories were relatively resistent to misleading information.
This suggests original memories for central details survived and were not distorted, an outcome not predicted by the substitution explanation.
Misleading Information: Evaluation
Evidence Challenging Memory Conformity
Limitation
- There is evidence that contradicts the memory conformity explanation, suggesting that PED actually alters EWT.
- Skagerberg and Wright (2008) showed their participants film clips.
- There were two versions: one where the 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 didn’t report what they saw or what they heard from the co-witness but instead a blend of the two (‘medium brown hair’).
This suggests that the memory itself is distorted through contamination by misleading post-event discussion, rather than simply memory conformity.
