Misleading information Flashcards
Demand characteristics
Controlling variables in lab studies has allowed researchers to pinpoint leading questions/post-event discussions as a cause of inaccurate recall. High control means high internal validity.
However, the responses participants give on memory tests in these studies may be affected by demand characteristics. As participants do not usually want to disappoint researchers, they try to work out what is expected of them and use cues in the procedure to do this. Participants watch films of car accidents or robberies and are asked questions worded in a certain way. When asked a question they don’t know the answer to (because they can’t remember what they originally saw), they guess. They give the answer they believe is most helpful. Such studies are measuring the participants’ ability to guess the hypothesis rather than the accuracy of their EWT. This would lead to low internal validity.
Therefore to maximise internal validity researchers need to control variables and also reduce demand characteristics by removing any potential cues participants can use to work out the hypothesis.
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 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 improve the way the legal system works, especially by protecting innocent people from faulty convictions based on unreliable EWT.
Counterpoint
However, 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 particapts are less likely 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.
Evidence against substitution
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.
Evidence challenging memory conformity
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 brown’ but ‘medium brown).
This suggests that the memory itself is distorted through contamination by misleading post-event discussion, rather than the result of memory conformity
