Factors affecting the accuracy of eyewitness testimony: misleading info Flashcards
what is eyewitness testimony?
The evidence provided in court by a person who witnessed a crime, with a view to identifying the perpetrator of the crime
What is misleading info?
Supplying info that may lead to a witness’ memory from a crime being altered
two elements
leading questions
post event discussion
Leading questions definition
A question that either by its form or content suggets to the witness what answer is desired or leads them to the desired answer
Leading questions study
Loftus and Palmer
Participants were shown videos of traffic collisions, and then given a questionnaire to test their immediate recall of the videos’ events.
Among the questions was one critical question, “About how fast were the cars going when they hit each other?”.
One group was asked this version, but four other groups were given versions that replaced “hit” with either “contacted”, “collided”, “bumped” or “smashed”.
The results found that vehicle speed estimates were fastest on average for participants given the “smashed” version, and slowest for participants given the “contacted” version, suggesting that an eye witness’ immediate recall of an event could be skewed by leading questions.
Post-event discussion definition
A convo between co-witnesseses or interview and eyewitess after a crime has taken place which may contaminate a witness’ memory for the event
Two parts of post-event discussion
Conformity effect
Repeated interviewing
Conformity effect
Co-witnesses may reach a consensus view on what actually happened
Research by Gabbert et al. 2003 investigated the effect of PED
Procedure:
Pairs of participants (students and older adults) each watched a different film clip of the same crime so each had a unique view of the event
Pairs were able to discuss what they had witnessed before carrying out a recall test of the event seen in the video
Findings:
A large proportion (71%) of eyewitnesses who had discussed the crime made mistakes when recalling the events
In pairs where no discussion had taken place 0% of mistakes in recall were made
This suggests that PED can lead to inaccurate eyewitness testimony
Repeated interviewing
Each time an eyewitness is interviewed there is a possibility that comments from the interviewer become incorporated into their recollection of events
AO3:
lim: ecological validity
lim: loftus population
str: RWA
str: evidence Disneyland
lim: ecological validity
The results of Gabbert et al have questionable ecological validity.
The participants in the co-witness condition witnessed different perspectives of the same crime, as would typically be the case in real life crimes.
However, like Loftus and Palmer, these witnesses knew they were taking part in an experiment and were more likely to have paid attention to the details of the video clip.
Therefore, these results do not reflect everyday examples of crime, where witnesses may be exposed to less information.
lim: loftus population
Participants were all students.
There are several ways in which students might not be representative of the general population. These may include age, driving experience, educational experiment (i.e. they may be used to paying attention and being tested)
str: RWA
Application to the criminal justice system
Psychological research has been used to warn the justice system of problems with eyewitness identification evidence.
Recent DNA exoneration cases have confirmed the warnings of eyewitness identification researchers by showing that mistaken eyewitness identification was the largest single factor contributing to the conviction of these innocent people (Wells and Olson, 2003).
This demonstrates the important role of EWT research in helping ensure that innocent people are not convicted of crimes they did not commit on the basis of faulty EWT.
str: evidence disneyland
There has been considerable support for research on the effect of misleading information.
Eg Loftus conducted a memorable study involving a cutout of Bugs Bunny
College students who had visited Disneyland as children were asked to evaluate advertising material about Disneyland containing misleading information about Bugs Bunny (not a Disney character) or Ariel (not introduced at the time of their childhood).
Participants assigned to the Bugs or Ariel groups were more likely to report having shaken hands with these characters than the control group (no misleading information).
This shows how powerful misleading information can be in creating an inaccurate (false) memory.
