Eyewitnes Testimony: Misleading Infomation Flashcards
What are ways of misleading information
Loftus and Palmers leading questions
Gabbert’s post even discussion
What did loftus define leading questions as?
Questions that leads to a desired answer
What was the first experiment made my lotus and plamer
45 participants watched a few clips of a car crash and were then asked to answer some questions about it. They were split into 5 groups and were all given the same questions, but with a different verb:
Smashed
Hit
Contacted
Collided
Bumped
Results showed that those who got the verb contacted said that the car was going 30 mph(around) and those who got the word smashed said that the car was going around 4pm-h.
What was the second experiment made by loftus and plamer
150 people watched a short movie that was around a minute long, that contained a car accident that lasted around 4 seconds. At the end the film they were given a questionnaire asking “how fast the car was going when they “smashed or hit” each other. Then a week later they were given another questionnaire that thy had to answer without watching the video again. The critical question in this asked “did you see any broken glass?” (There wasn’t any broken glass) results showed that those who had the verb smash were more likely to say yes (16) in comparison to those who had the word hit, who said they saw broken glass (7).
Strength evaluation on research of leading questions
P-supporting research
E- psychologists showed participants a video of a car crash and asked “did you see THE broken headlight?” Where 17% of particpants said yes Or “ did you see A broken headlight ?” Where 7% of particpants said there was one (there was no broken headlight in the video).
E- this shows that leading questions can lead to people remembering something that wasn’t actually there.
Research on post event discussion
Participant’s were paired and watched a video of the same crime, but from different points of view so some could see things that they others couldn’t. They discussed together what they had seen, and then individually completed a test of recall. 71% of particpants recalled something that didn’t occur in their video but was mentioned in the post event discussion. In comparison to the control group that had no discussion and had no subsequent errors.
Whats the different between memory conformity and memory contamination
Memory conformity = witnesses agree with others (even when they didn’t see it), to gain social approval
Memory contamination = incorrectly remembering things
Evaluation strength of misleading infomation
P- real world applications
E- the consequences of inaccurate EWT is serious therefore loftus warned police about the way they phrased their questions because of distorting effects.
E- it can improve the legal system to protect the innocent about faulty convictions
Limitation evaluation of misleading information
P- contradictory findings
E- psychologists found that participants recalled central details of an event better than peripheral ones, even when asked leading questions. This is presumed because they focused their attention on the central features and the memories were resistant to the misleading information
E- this doesn’t support the findings of loftus and palmer, decreasing the validity
P- doesn’t support memory conformity
E- 2 groups of particpants watched a video of a crime and in one version he had dark brown hair and in the other version he had light brown hair. After the post event discussion, they recalled a ‘blend’ of what they had seen and heard, and they said the man had medium brown hair
E-post event discussion isn’t always the reason for memory conformity and it could also be influenced of memory contamination
