factors affecting eye witness testimony misleading info

Question 1

loftus and palmer 1974
procedure

Answer 1

arranged for participants to watch film clips of car accidents then gave them questions about the accident
in the critical question they were asked “how fast were the car going when they hit each other “
a leading question due to the verb
five groups of participants each was given a different verb in the critical question
hit , contacted , bumped , collided , smashed

Question 2

loftus and palmer 1974
findings

Answer 2

the mean estimated speed was calculated for each participant group
contacted = 31.8 LOWEST
smashed = 40.5 HIGHEST
leading question biased the eyewitness recall of an event

Question 3

response bias explanation

Answer 3

suggests that the wording of the question has no real effect on the participants memories but just influences how the participant decides to answer .smashed = encourages them to estimate a higher speed

Question 4

substitution explanation

Answer 4

lotus and palmer second experiment supported this explantation
the wording of a leading question actually changes the participants memory of the film clip .
this was demonstrated as participants who originally heard smashed later were more likely to report seeing broken glass than those who heard hit .
the critical verb altered the memory of the incident

Question 5

post event discussions
procedure

Answer 5

gabbert and her colleagues 2003
studied participants in pairs , each p watched a video of the same crime but filmed from diff pop
each p could see elements of the event that the other could not
both p then discussed what they had seen before individually completing a test of recall

Question 6

post event discussions
findings

Answer 6

71% of the participants mistakenly recalled aspects they didn’t see in the video but those that were in the discuss
corresponding figure in a control group when there was no discussion was 0%

Question 7

post event discussions
conclusion

Answer 7

concluded that witnesses often go along with each other to win social approval or because they believe the other witnesses are right and they are wrong . this is called memory conformity.

Question 8

useful real life applications
strength

Answer 8

loftus 1975
believe 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 eyewitness
research into ewt improves the way the legal system works and real life cases

Question 9

the tasks are artificial
weakness

Answer 9

loftus and palmer made ps watch clips of car accidents . a very different experience to witnessing a car accident mainly due to the ack of stress from clips . and there is some evidence that emotion can effect real of ewt
limitation as it uses artificial studies tells us very little about how leading questions affect ewt with real crimes etc

Question 10

indvidual diffrences
weakness

Answer 10

evidence that older people are less accurate then younger people when giving eyewitness reports
Anatasi and rhodes 2006
found people in the age group 18-25 and 35-45 were more accurate than people in the group 55-78 years .
however all age groups were more accurate when identifying people of their own age group , called own age bias .

Question 11

demand characteristics
weakness

Answer 11

Zaragosa and McCloskey 1989
argue that many answers participants give in lab studies of ewt are the result of demand characteristics
participates usually do not want to let the researcher down so when presented with closed questions with only yes or no answer they want to seem attentive and helpful so are meow likely to agree if asked about an object etc is present .

Question 12

consequences of ewt
weakness

Answer 12

foster et al 1994
what you remember as an eyewitness in real life is very important and has consequences however the same consequence is not present in real life so people feel less obliged to be whole heartedly truthful and links back to demand characteristics .