factors affecting accuracy of EWT: misleading info

Question 1

what is an eyewitness estimony?

Answer 1

• the ability of people to remember the details of events, such as accidents and crimes, which they themselves have observed
• accuracy of EWT can be affected by factors such as misleading information and anxiety

Question 2

what is the procedure for research on leading questions? (loftus and palmer 1974)

Answer 2

• 45 students to watch film clips of car accidents and then asked them questions about the accident
• in the critical question, participants were asked to describe how fast the cars were travelling: ‘about how fast were the cars going when they hit each other?’
• there were five groups of participants and each group was given a different word in the critical question
  > hit, contacted, bumped, collided or smashed

Question 3

what were the findings for loftus and palmer’s research on leading questions?

Answer 3

• the mean estimated speed was calculated for each participant group
• ‘contacted’ had a mean estimated speed of 31.8 mph but for ‘smashed’ it was 40.5
• therefore, leading questions biased the eyewitness’s recall of the event

Question 4

what are 2 explanations for as to why leading questions affect EWT

Answer 4

1. response-bias explanantion
2. substitution explanation

Question 5

what is the response-bias explanation?

Answer 5

• the wording of the question has no real effect on the participants’ memories, but influes how they decide to answer
• when a participant has a leading question using the word ‘smashed’, it encourages them to choose a higher speed estimate

Question 6

what support is there for the substitution explanation?

Answer 6

• proposes that the word of a leading question changes the participant’s memory of the film clip
• loftus and palmer (1974) conducted a second experiment which supports this explanation
• participants were originally heard ‘smashed’ were later more likely to report seeing broken glass when there was none compared to those who heard ‘hit’
• therefore, the critical verb altered their memory of the incident

Question 7

what is a post-even discussion?

Answer 7

• occurs when there is more than one witness to an event
• witnesses may discuss what they have seen with co-witnesses or other people
• this may influence the accuracy of each witness’s recall of the event

Question 8

what is the procedure for research on post-event discussion? (gabbert et al. 2003)

Answer 8

• studied participants in pairs
• each participant watched a video of the same crime, but filmed from different points of view
• this meant that each participant could see elements in the event that the other could not
• both participants then discussed what they had seen before individually completing a test of recall

Question 9

what were the findings of gabbert et al.’s research on post-event discussion?

Answer 9

• 71% of participants mistakenly recalled aspects of the event that they did not see in the video, but had picked up in the discussion
• in the control group where there was no discussion, there was 0% mistaken recall
• this was evidence of memory conformity

Question 10

what were the 2 explanations for as to why post-event discussions affect EWT?

Answer 10

1. memory contamination
2. memory conformity

Question 11

what is memory contamination?

Answer 11

• when co-witnesses to a crime discuss it with each other, the EWT may become altered or distorted
• this is because they combine (mis)information from other witnesses with their own memories

Question 12

what is memory conformity?

Answer 12

• gabbert et al. concluded that witnesses often go along with each other
• this could be to win social approval, or because they believe the other witnesses are right and they are wrong
• unlike with memory contamination, they actual memory is unchanged

Question 13

evaluation: real-world application in criminal justice system

Answer 13

• the consequences of inaccurate EWT can be very serious
• loftus (1975) believes that leading questions can have such a distorting effect on memory that police officers need to be very careful about how they phrase their questions when interviewing eyewitnesses
• psychologists are sometimes asked to act as expert witnesses in court trials and explain the limits of EWT to juries
• this shows that psychologists can help to improve the way the legal system works, especially by protecting innocent people from faulty convictions based on unreliable EWT

Question 14

evaluation: practical applications of EWT may be affected by issues with resarch

Answer 14

• loftus and palmer’s partipants watched film clips in a lab, which is a very different experience from witnessing a real event (eg. less stressful)
• foster et al. (1994) point out that what eyewitnesses remember has important consequences in the real world, but partipants’ responses in research do not matter in the same way, so research partipants are less motivated to be accurate
• this suggests that researchers such as loftus are too pessimistic about the effects of misleading information; EWT may be more dependable than many studies suggest

Question 15

evaluation: false memory (cliasefi et al. 2013)

Answer 15

• attempted to use leading questions to implant a memory of an event that never happened
• gave their participants a document that claimed to be a personalised food and drink profile supposedly put together by powerful computer software based on their earlier responses to a questionnaire
• for one group, their profiles contained the false information that they had once drunk so much alcohol they were sick
• later, the pps completed a memory test in which a leading question asked when they had become sick from drinking too much alcholol
• a significant number of the pps ‘recalled’ being sick due to drinking too much alchool when they were younger
• some of these pps also claimed that they now disliked certain alcoholic drinks because of this (non-existent) experience

Question 16

evaluation: evidence against substitution

Answer 16

• EWT is more accurate for some aspects of an event than for others
• sutherland and hayne (2001) showed participants a video clip
• when pps were later asked misleading questions, their recall was more accurate for central details of the event than for peripheral ones
• presumably, the participants’ attention was focused on central details of the event and these memories were relatively resistant to misleading information
• this suggests that the original memories for central details survived and were not distorted, an outcome that is not predicted by the substitution explanantion

Question 17

evaluation: evidence that PED actually alters EWT, challenging memory conformity (skagerberg and wright 2008)

Answer 17

• showed their participants film clips
• there were two versions eg. a 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 did not report what they had seen in the clips or what they had heard from the co-witness, but a blend of the two
  > common answer to the hair question was not ‘light brown’ or ‘dark brown’ but ‘medium brown’
• this suggests that the memory itself is distorted through contamination by misleading PED, rather than the result of memory conformity

Question 18

evaluation: disentangling PED (bodner et al. 2009)

Answer 18

• found that the effects of PED can be reduced if participants are warned of their impact
• recall was more accurate for those participants whowere warned that anything they hear from a co-witness is second-hand information and that they should forget it and recall only their own memory of the event

Question 19

evaluation: demand characteristics

Answer 19

• zaragoza and mccloskey (1989) argue that many answers given by participants in lab studies are due to demand characteristics
• participants usually want to be helpful and not let the resarcher down so they guess when they are asked a question they don’t know the answer to