MEM 11 - EWT misleading information

Question 1

What is an eyewitness testimony (EWT)?

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 misleading information?

Answer 2

• Incorrect information given to an 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

Question 3

What are leading questions?

Answer 3

• A question which, because of the way it is phrased, suggests a certain answer
• For example, ‘Was the knife in their left hand?’ leads a person to think that’s where the knife was

Question 4

What is post-event discussion (PED)?

Answer 4

• It 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 5

What can post-event discussion cause?

Answer 5

Memory contamination and/or memory conformity

Question 6

What can leading questions discussion cause?

Answer 6

Response bias and/or substitution explanation

Question 7

What is memory contamination

Answer 7

• When co-witnesses to a crime discuss it with each other, their eyewitness testimonies may become altered or distorted
• This is because they combine (mis)information from other witnesses with their own memories

Question 8

What is memory conformity?

Answer 8

• When 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
• Unlike with memory contamination, the actual memory is unchanged.

Question 9

Why do leading questions affect EWT?

Answer 9

• The response-bias explanation suggests that the wording of the question has no real effect on the participants’ memories, but just influences how they decide to answer
• When a participant gets a leading question using the word smashed, this encourages them to choose a higher speed estimate
• Loftus and Palmer (1974) conducted a second experiment that supported the substitution explanation, which proposes that the wording of a leading question changes the participant’s memory of the film clip
• This was shown because participants who originally heard smashed were later 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 10

What is response bias?

Answer 10

• It refers to the tendency for participants in a study to respond in a certain way that doesn’t reflect their true feelings, thoughts, or behaviours
• This bias can distort the results of an experiment or survey, leading to inaccurate conclusions
• This occurs when individuals confirm what the questioner implies with their leading question, to be helpful

Question 11

What is the substitution explanation?

Answer 11

It typically refers to a way of understanding a phenomenon where information from a leading question is actually incorporated into the original memory trace, making it feel like it is part of the memory

Question 12

What are the strengths of the research conducted on misleading information?

Answer 12

• 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 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 13

What are limitations of the research conducted on misleading infomation?

Answer 13

• The practical applications of EWT may be affected by issues with research
• For instance, Loftus and Palmer’s participants watched film clips in a lab, a very different experience from witnessing a real event (e.g. less stressful)
• Also, Rachel Foster et al. (1994) point out that what eyewitnesses remember has important consequences in the real world, but participants’ responses in research do not matter in the same way (so research participants 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 14

What is one limitation of the substitution explanation?

Answer 14

• One limitation of the substitution explanation is that EWT is more accurate for some aspects of an event than for others
• For example, Rachel Sutherland and Harlene Hayne (2001) showed participants a video clip
• When participants 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 features 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 explanation

Question 15

What is one limitation of the memory conformity explanation?

Answer 15

• Another limitation of the memory conformity explanation is evidence that post-event discussion actually alters EWT
• Elin Skagerberg and Daniel Wright (2008) showed their participants film clips
• There were two versions, e.g. 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 (e.g. a common answer to the hair question was not ‘light brown’ or ‘dark brownʼ but ‘medium brownʼ)
• This suggests that the memory itself is distorted through contamination by misleading post-event discussion, rather than the result of memory conformity

Question 16

Why does post-event discussion affect EWT?

Answer 16

• One explanation is memory contamination
• When co-witnesses to a crime discuss it with each other, their eyewitness testimonies may become altered or distorted
• This is because they combine (mis)information from other witnesses with their own memories
• Another explanation is memory conformity
• 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
• Unlike with memory contamination, the actual memory is unchanged

Question 17

Who conducted research on leading questions?

Answer 17

Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer (1974)

Question 18

What is the procedure for the research on leading questions?

Answer 18

• Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer (1974) arranged for 45 participants (students) to watch film clips of car accidents and then asked them questions about the accident
• In the critical question (a leading question or also called misleading information) 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 verb in the critical question
• One group had the verb hit, the others had contacted, bumped, collided, smashed

Question 19

What were the findings of the research on leading questions?

Answer 19

• The mean 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’s recall of an event

Question 20

What is the procedure for the research on post-event discussion?

Answer 20

• Fiona Gabbert et al. (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 of recall

Question 21

What were the findings of the research on post event discussion?

Answer 21

• 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%
• This was evidence of memory conformity.