Misleading Info on EWT Flashcards
Describe Eye Witness Testimony
The evidence provided in court by a person who witnessed a crime, with the aim of identifying the perpetrator
What is misleading info?
Any information that leads an eyewitness into giving a particular response following an event, as opposed to an accurate response. Your memory of an event can be corrupted by later info.
Outline the two types of misleading info
Leading questions – the way a question is worded can influence your recall
Post event discussion – when witnesses discuss an event and their memory can get contaminated by things that other people say
Explain the 2 ways leading questions affect EWT
Response-bias explanation – the eyewitness does not answer the question accurately, they answer in the way that they think they should answer
Substitution explanation – leading questions change a person’s memory of an event by adding detail that was not present at the time of them witnessing the event
Explain the 2 ways Post Event Discussion affects EWT
Memory contamination – when co-witnesses to a crime discuss it with each other, their eyewitness testimonies may become altered or distorted as they combine (mis)information from other witnesses with their own memories
Memory conformity – witnesses go along with each other, either to win social approval or because they believe the other witnesses are right and they are wrong
Evidence for leading questions - first study
Loftus and Palmer (1974)
45 students were asked to watch video of car crash · Asked a question (‘how fast were the cars going when they….. each other?’) and the verb used in the question was changed for each group. The verbs used were contacted, bumped, collided, hit, smashed and varied in their degree of ‘charge’ · It was found the more charge behind the verb resulted in a higher speed estimate as their memories were distorted.
Evidence for leading questions - second study
Loftus and Palmer (1974)
They carried out another experiment whereby they got participants to watch the video of the car crash and asked the same question - How fast were the cars going when they “contacted, bumped, collided, hit, smashed” A week later they were asked whether they saw any broken glass, even though there was no broken glass in the video · Participants who were given the more charged verbs= more likely to report seeing broken glass as their memory of original event was distorted due to one word in a sentence
Evidence for post-event discussion
Gabbert et al (2003) (Gabert is a gossip who likes to discuss after events)
Pairs of participants watched a video of a crime which was filmed from different points of view – each participant could see elements in the event that the other couldn’t. Pairs then discussed what they had seen before completing a recall test.
71% of participants mistakenly recalled aspects of event they did not see but had picked up in discussion.
In a control group where there was no discussion, this figure was 0%
1 Strength of misleading info on EWT
Real-life application:
Has huge implications on the criminal justice system which relies on EWT for prosecuting crimes. Loftus’ research reveals the need for the police to be careful in the phrasing of their questions so as not to distort memory. This specifically led to the development of the cognitive interview. The cognitive interview, developed by Geiselman and colleagues, is a method of interviewing eyewitnesses to a crime to help them retrieve more accurate memories.
As a result, highlighting misleading information as a negative factor in EWT has led to new techniques designed to improve memory retrieval, enhancing the explanatory power of such research.
3 Limitations of misleading info on EWT
Artificial tasks:
lacks ecological validity as they were carried out in labs and therefore do not represent real life. This may lead to participants not taking them seriously and/or they are not emotionally aroused in the way that they would be in a real accident. Yuille and Cutshall (1986) found that witnesses to an armed robbery in Canada gave very accurate reports of the crime for four months after the event despite initially being given two misleading questions. This suggests that misleading information may have less influence on real-life EWT than Loftus’ research suggests.
Individual differences:
Older people are less accurate than younger people when giving eyewitness reports. Many studies such as Pica and Pozzolu (2017) have found that, compared to younger subjects, elderly people have difficulty remembering the source of their information, even though their memory for the information itself is unimpaired. As a result, they become more prone to the effect of misleading information when giving testimony.
Demand characteristics:
Studies in a lab setting. May want to appear helpful and attentive. And such when they are asked a question they don’t know the answer to, they guess, especially if it’s a yes/no question.
