Factors Effecting Eyewitness Testimony: Misleading Information

Question 1

Key terms

Answer 1

Eyewitness testimony (EWT) = 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, leading questions and anxiety.
Misleading information = Incorrect information given to the eyewitness usually after the event (hence often called ‘post-event information’). It can take many forms, such as leading questions and post-event discussion between co-witnesses and/or other people.
Leading question = I question which, because of the way it is phrased, suggests a certain answer. For example: ‘Was the knife in the accused‘s left hand?. This suggests the answer is ‘left hand’.
Post-event discussion (PED) = Occurs when there is more than one witness to an event. Witnesses may discuss what they have seen with co-witnesses or with other people. This may influence the accuracy of each witness’s recall of the event.

Question 2

Leading questions

Answer 2

Procedure
Loftus & Palmer (1974) arranged for participants (students) to watch film clips of car accidents and then gave them questions about the accident. In the critical question (a leading question) participants were asked to describe how fast the cars were travelling: ’About how fast were the cars going when they hit each other?’.
This is a leading question because the verb ‘hit’ suggests the speed the car was going. There were five groups of participants, each was given a different verb in the critical question. One group had the verb hit, others had contacted, bumped, collided, smashed.

Findings
The main estimated speed was calculated for each participant group. The verb ‘contacted’ resulted in a mean estimated speed of 31.8 mph. For the verb ‘smashed’ the mean was 40.5 mph. The leading question biased the eyewitness recall of an event.

Why do leading questions affect EWT?
The response-bias explanation suggests that the wording of the question has no real effect on the participants’ memories, but just influences how we describe the answer. When a participant gets a leading question using the word ‘smashed’, this encourages them to choose a higher speed estimate.
Loftus & Palmer (1974) conducted a second experiment that supported the substitution explanation – the wording of a leading question actually changes the participant’s memory of the film clip. This was demonstrated because participants who originally heard ‘smashed’ later were more likely to report seeing broken glass (there was none) than those who heard ‘hit’. The critical verb altered their memory of the incident.

Question 3

Post-event discussion

Answer 3

When co-witnesses to a crime discuss it with each other (post-event discussion), their eyewitness testimonies may become contaminated. This is because they combine (mis)information from other witnesses with their own memories. Research has demonstrated how this happens.

Procedure
Gabbert and her colleagues (2003) 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. For example, only one of the participants could see the title of a book being carried by a young woman.
Both participants then discussed what they had seen before individually completing a test recall.

Findings
The researchers found that 71% of the participants mistakenly recalled aspects of the event that they did not see in the video but had picked up in the discussion. The corresponding figure in a control group, where there was no discussion, was 0%. Gabbert et al. concluded that witnesses often go along with each other, either to win social approval or because they believe the other witnesses are right and they are wrong. They called this phenomenon memory conformity.

Question 4

Evaluation of misleading information (useful real-life application, the tasks are artificial, individual differences)

Answer 4

+ A great strength of all research into misleading information is that it has hugely important practical uses in the real world, where the consequences of inaccurate EWT can be very serious indeed. For example, 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.
Research into EWT is one area in which psychologists believe they can make an important positive difference to the lives of real people, for instance by improving the way the legal system works and by appearing in court trials as expert witnesses.

• A real limitation of Loftus & Palmer’s study is that their participants watched film clips of car accidents. This is a very different experience from witnessing a real accident, mainly because such clips lack the stress of a real accident. There is some evidence that emotions can have an influence on memory.
  This is a limitation because studies that use such artificial tasks may tell us very little about how leading questions affect EWT in cases of real accidents/crimes. It could even be that researchers such as Loftus are too pessimistic about the accuracy of EWT - it may be more reliable than many studies suggest.
• There is evidence that older people are less accurate than younger people when giving eyewitness reports. For example, Anastasi & Rhodes (2006) found that people in age groups 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).
  Research studies often use younger people as the target to identify and this may mean that some age groups appear less accurate but in fact this is not true.