eyewitness testimony: misleading information Flashcards
leading questions - what is the response bias explanation?
- wording doesn’t have effect on memory of event
- but does influence the kind of answer given
leading questions - what is the substitution explanation?
- wording of question does affect memory
- interferes with original memory which distorts accuracy
Loftus and Palmer (74) leading questions:
what is the procedure?
- 45 students watch film clip od car accident
- answer questions about speed
- critical questions was “how fast were the cars coming”
5 groups of participants given different verbs in the critical question: hit, bumped, collided, smashed, contacted
Loftus and Palmer (74) leading questions:
what are the findings?
- “contacted” gave average speed guess of 31.8 mph
- “smashed” gave speed of 40.5 mph
- “smashed” also caused people to recall smashed glass when there wasn’t
Loftus and Palmer (74) leading questions:
what is the conclusion?
- the leading question caused a biased eyewitness recall of events
- word smashed suggested higher speed than contacted
post event discussion - what is memory contamination?
- when co-witnesses discuss the crime
- they mix (mis)information from other people with their own memories
post event discussion (PED) - what is memory conformity?
- witnesses go along with each other to win social approval
- also may do it because they believe the other person’s right and they’re wrong
Gabbert et al (2003) post-event discussion:
what is the procedure?
- paired participants watch video of same crime but they see different elements of it
- both people discuss what they saw before individually completing a test of recall
Gabbert et al (2003) post-event discussion:
what is are the findings?
- 71% of participants mistakenly recall aspects of the video they didn’t see but heard about in the discussion
- in a control group where there was no discussion, there were no errors
+ useful real life application
- Loftus (75) believe leading questions have such dogtrotting effect that price should be careful which questions they ask
- research into EWT can improve legal system
- tasks are artificial (watching a car crash video)
- watch films doesn’t create the same stress of the an actual car crash (emotion effects memory)
- artificial tasks tell us little as it doesn’t account for emotion
- individual differences
- it was said older people recall worse than younger ones
- Anastasi and Rhodes (06) found people 18-25 and 35-45 more accurate than 55-78 year olds
- all groups more accurate when identifying people of same age (age bias)