Eyewitness Testimony

Question 1

Define eyewitness testimony

Answer 1

is the evidence provided in court by a person who has witnessed a crime/incident with a view to identifying the perpetrator of the crime. It can be affected by many things such as leading questions and misleading information

Question 2

Define leading questions

Answer 2

Leading Question: A leading question is one that by its form or content, suggests to the witness what answer is desired or leads them to a desired answer.

Question 3

Summarise loftus and palmers experiment

Answer 3

im: To investigate the effect of leading questions in distorting the accuracy of EWT.
Procedure:
• They carried out a laboratory experiment using independent groups design.
• 45 American students were shown seven films of different car accidents. After each film the participants were given a questionnaire asking them to describe the accident, they were also asked a series of specific questions including one critical question.
‘About how fast were the cars going when they _____ each other?’
• The participants were divided into five groups and each group was asked the critical question with one of the following five verbs: hit, smashed, collided, bumped, contacted
• The IV = Wording of the Question and the DV = Speed Reported by the Participants in MPH.

Question 4

What were the findings of loftus and palmer

Answer 4

• The estimated speed was affected by the verb used.
• The group given the word ‘smashed’ estimated the highest speed (40.8 mph) and the group given the word ‘contacted’ estimated the lowest speed (31.8 mph).

Question 5

What is post event discussion ?

Answer 5

refers to any information discussed after the event has happened which could influence a person’s memory of the event. This could include discussions with other witnesses, news reports, or chats with friends/family members. This results in eyewitness testimonies becoming contaminated because they combine mis(information) from other witnesses with their own memories.

Question 6

What is memory conformity?

Answer 6

er witnesses with their own memories. This is often referred to as memory conformity – the witnesses go along with others accounts for social approval or because they believe they are right.

Question 7

What is source monitoring?

Answer 7

Source-monitoring can also occur, whereby alternative accounts are heard by individuals causing distortion in memory, resulting in confusion. These concepts within PED have been found to have a negative effect on the accuracy of eyewitness testimony.

Question 8

Summarise gabbert et al experiment .

Answer 8

Aim: To investigating the effects of post-event information in distorting the accuracy of EWT.
Procedure:
• Laboratory experiment
• Experimental group - paired participants watched a video of the same simulated robbery but from different angles so that each participant could see elements in the event that the other could not. Both participants discussed what they had seen on the video (post-event discussion) before individually completing a test of recall.
• Control group - participants watched the simulated robbery but did not take part in a post-event discussion.
• DV – The research measured the number of incorrect items recalled by the participants as a result of the post-event discussion.

Question 9

What were the findings ? Gabbert et al

Answer 9

• 71% of the participants in the experimental group mistakenly recalled aspects of the event that they did not see in the video but had picked up in the post-event discussion.
• 60% said that the girl was guilty, despite the fact they had not seen her commit a crime from the angle they had watched the video.
• 0% of the control group made errors.

Question 10

What is real life application as a strength of LQ AND PED

Answer 10

The research has led to important practical uses for police officers and investigators. For example, it highlights the importance of ensuring that the police gather information from witnesses immediately after a crime has been witnessed and to take care in how they phrase their questions when interviewing eyewitnesses to avoid leading questions and post-event discussion from distorting the eye-witnesses’ memory. This is a strength as the consequences of inaccurate EWT due to post-event discussion can be very serious therefore the research has important implications for forensic psychology. It can make a difference to real people by improving how the legal system works and improving the quality of expert eyewitnesses during the court process.

Question 11

Why is task artificiality a limitation ?

Answer 11

Laboratory experiments, such as those carried out by Loftus, may not represent real life because people are not emotionally aroused watching clips in the way they would be during witnessing an unexpected real incident, mainly because such clips lack the stress of a real accident. There is some evidence that emotions can influence memory. Furthermore, in an artificial setting, participants are aware that there is a lack of consequences for providing inaccurate EWT, unlike in the real world setting of a courtroom. This is a limitation because studies that use such artificial tasks may tell us very little about how leading questions or post event discussion affect EWT in cases of real-life crimes or incidents.

Question 12

Why is misleading info on EWT reliable?

Answer 12

many studies have been conducted and have regularly found similar results. For example, Loftus tended to use a range of controlled experiments illustrating different examples of EWT i.e. leading questions and research into anxiety. Due to much of her work being carried out in a laboratory, she could control many extraneous variables, meaning her research was easy to replicate. For example, in her ‘car crash experiment’, all of the participants watched the same video and received the same standardised instructions. This means that researchers using identical procedures should produce similar results. Indeed, Loftus has conducted many studies into EWT and invariably found the same outcome – that misleading information negatively affects EWT.

Question 13

What are real life research to criticise ? Misleading info EWT

Answer 13

One limitation of research into the effect of misleading information on EWT is that Yuille & Cutshall (1986) contradict Loftus’ findings as they found leading questions did not reduce accuracy of recall. Witnesses to a real armed robbery of a gun shop in Canada gave very accurate reports of the crime four months after the event even though they had initially been given two misleading questions. This suggests that misleading information may have less influence on the accuracy of real-life eyewitness testimony.

Question 14

What is the effect of anxiety on EWT

Answer 14

high anxiety may negatively affect how we actually store and encode the information therefore affecting how accurately we can recall the correct information. Laboratory studies in general demonstrate that high anxiety leads to poor accuracy of recall. It is believed that eye witness testimony is most accurate when the anxiety level is somewhere in between low and high.

Question 15

What does the yerkes Dodson curve tell us?

Answer 15

o High Anxiety = Poor Recall
o Medium Anxiety = Optimal Recall
o Low Anxiety = Poor Recall

A different account of why anxiety might reduce the accuracy of EWT is the weapons focus effect – the view that a weapon in a criminal’s hands distracts attention (because of the anxiety it creates) from other features negatively affecting the ability to recall important details.

Question 16

Summarise Johnson and scott experiment .

Answer 16

Aim: To investigate whether high levels of anxiety will affect accuracy of recall.

Procedure:
• Johnson & Scott (1976) used two experimental conditions, one with a weapon and one without. The participants were asked to sit outside a room where they thought they heard a genuine discussion between two people.
• Low Anxiety (no weapon) – The conversation was peaceful about some office equipment. When they were finished a man emerged holding a pen and with grease on his hands.
• High Anxiety (with weapon) – The conversation was more heated, participants heard breaking glass and a man emerged holding a knife covered in blood.
• DV – the number of correct identifications made of the man from 50 photographs.

Question 17

What were the findings? Johnson and Scott

Answer 17

Findings: Johnson & Scott (1976) found that in the low anxiety (no weapon) condition, 49% of participants were able to accurately identify the man holding a pen from the photographs. In the high anxiety (with weapon) condition, memory recall was much less as there was only 33% accuracy from participants.

Question 18

Summarise loftus and burns experiment.

Answer 18

another controlled study by Loftus and Burns (1982), participants watched a film of a simulated robbery. Some watched a non-violent version of the robbery and some watched a violent version (where a boy was shot in the face)

Findings: When questioned afterwards those who watched the non-violent condition recalled significantly more details of the crime than those who watched the violent condition

Question 19

Why does research into anxiety lack validity?

Answer 19

. using a video of a robbery is not the same as a real incident. We cannot reliably create real levels of anxiety experienced by a real eyewitness during an actual crime in a laboratory for various practical and ethical reasons i.e. it is not as unexpected or emotional as it would be in real life. Real life events often take place unexpectedly and in an atmosphere of high tension. They may therefore be recalled significantly different to laboratory settings. Furthermore Foster et al. (1994) found that if participants thought they were watching a real-life robbery important to a real trial their identification of the robber was much more accurate than if they did not. Therefore, findings from controlled research settings such as these may lack ecological validity, which in turn may undermine the findings that anxiety leads to inaccurate memory recall.

Question 20

What did pickel criticise about research into anxiety ?

Answer 20

suggesting that the reduced accuracy of recall caused by the weapon focus effect could actually be due to surprise and not anxiety. Eyewitnesses may focus on a weapon because they are surprised at what they see, rather than because they are scared. Participants were asked to watch a thief enter a hairdressing salon carrying scissors (high threat, low surprise), a handgun (high threat, high surprise), wallet (low threat, low surprise) or a whole raw chicken (low threat, high surprise). It was found that eyewitness testimony accuracy was poorer in the high surprise conditions rather than the high threat conditions. This suggests that the weapon focus effect may be due to surprise and unusualness rather than anxiety and therefore leads us to question the internal validity of research such as Johnson and Scott’s (1976) as such studies may not be measuring the effect of anxiety on the accuracy of eyewitness testimony at all.

Question 21

What is some contradictory evidence ?

Answer 21

Christianson and Hubinette conducted a natural experiment which found that emotional arousal may actually enhance the accuracy of memory. They questioned 110 real witnesses to 22 real bank robberies. They found that witnesses who had been threatened in some way and experienced very high anxiety were much more accurate in their recall of details, than those who had been onlookers and less emotionally aroused. They concluded that people (especially victims of violent crimes) are good at remembering highly stressful events in real life rather than artificial surroundings. This is a limitation as it casts doubt on the Yerkes-Dodson curve hypothesis, as those with very high anxiety should have shown less accurate recall.

Question 22

What are the ethical issues ?

Answer 22

cannot induce unnecessary psychological harm in their research and must gain informed consent from participants to take part. However, with EWT one important variable is ANXIETY, unless this occurs naturally it is likely that the methods used to do this (such as using a violent film) may still cause mild harm, especially to children. This means that ethically, much research into this area may be questionable. However, if psychologists do not create anxiety in the laboratory the findings are unlikely to be valid. This demonstrates that such research must be subjected to a cost- benefit analysis.