Factors affecting the accuracy of eye witness testimony: Misleading information Flashcards
Explain research into misleading questions.
Loftus and palmer arranged for 45 students to watch film clips of car accidents and then they were asked questions about the accident. Participants were asked to define how fast the cars were going when they hit each other. There were five groups of participants and each group was given a different verb. Hit, contacted,bumped, collided and smashed. The mean estimated speed was calculated from each group. The contacted resulted in a mean of 31.8 as oppose to the smashed which resulted in 40.5mph. This suggests that the leading question biased the eye witness recall of an event.
Explain research into post event discussion.
Gabbert studied participants in pairs. Each participant watched a video of the same crime but they did not know that they were watching it from different perspectives. This meant that each participant saw different things. They discussed what they had seen before completing a recall test. The researchers found that 71% of participants mistakenly recalled something they had not seen in the video.
What is memory contamination?
When co-witnesses discuss a crime, they mix information from other witnesses with their own memories
What is memory conformity?
Witnesses go along with each other to win social approval or because they believe the other witnesses are right
Strength of research into misleading information. (High level of control)
In loftus and palmers experiment, there was a high degree of control as it was conducted in a lane setting. Researchers could ensure there were no confounding variables such as the age of participants. Increases the study’s validity.
What is a misleading question?
When wording of the question may lead or mislead you to give a certain answer.
Why are misleading questions important in the context of eyewitness testimony?
Police questions could direct a witness to give a particular answer.
Strength of research into misleading information (real-world application).
One strength of research into misleading information is that it has important practical uses in the criminal justice system. The consequences of inaccurate EWT can be serious. Loftus 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 eyewitness
Limitation of research into misleading information (evidence to challenge memory conformity).
Another limitation of the memory conformity explanation is evidence that contamination and post-event discussion actually alters eye witnesses testimony. Skater berg and Wright showed their participants film clips. There were two versions e.g s muggers hair was dark brown in one but light brown in the other. They often did not report what they had seen in the clips or heard from the co-witness but instead a blend of the two e.g medium brown hair.
This suggests that the memory itself is distorted through contamination rather than memory conformity.
