Misleading information and EWT Flashcards
what is EWT?
evidence provided in court by a witness, with a view of identifying the perpetrator of a crime
what are the 3 stages of EWT?
- Leading questions
- Misleading information
- Post-event discussion
what are the factors that affect EWT accuracy?
age
anxiety
misleading information
what are leading questions?
a question that suggests to the witness what answer is desired, or leads the witness to a desired answer
what did Loftus and Palmer (1974) study?
45 participants watched 7 film clips and then answered a questionnaire with the critical question: “About how fast were the cars going when they hit eachother?”
One group had this question, the other 4 groups had the verbs “smashed”, “collided”, “bumped” or “contacted” to replace the word “hit”.
It was found the ‘smashed’ group had the highest mean speed rating at 40.8 mph, and the ‘contacted’ group had the lowest mean speed rating at 31. 8 mph.
what did Yuille and Cutshall (1986) study?
evidence against Loftus and Palmer
interviewed 13 people who witnessed an armed robbery in Canada
the interviews took place 4 months after the crime
they included two misleading questions
found the witnesses provided accurate recall that matched their initial report
what is post event discussion?
occurs when there is more than one witness to an event
the memory of the event may be altered or contaminated through discussing event with others/co-witnesses
this may influence the accuracy of each witnesses recall of the event
what is the conformity effect (Gabbert et al, 2003)?
shower pairs of participants a different video of the same event
in one condition, pairs discussed what they had witnessed before recalling individually
71% of witnesses who had discussed went on to recall events they could have only learned from discussion with their partner
what is repeat interviewing (LaRooy et al, 2005)?
each time a witness is interviewed, the interviewers comments risk being incorporated into the witnesses memory
the interviewer may unintentionally use leading questions which may alter memories, this is an even greater risk when interviewing children
what are the limitations of EWT?
misleading information can lead to false memories (braun et al, 2002)
lab experiments don’t reflect real life (foster et al, 1994)
individual differences (schacter et al, 1991)
demand characteristics (Bekerian and bowers, 1983)
not reliable
what are the strengths of EWT?
real world applications
what did braun et al (2002) study?
false memories
college students who had been to disneyland as a child, evaluated adverts containing misinformation about bugs bunny or ariel
found participants exposed to misinformation were more likely to report meeting these characters compared to a control group
what did foster et al (1994) find?
while participants thought they were watching a real life robbery and believed their statement would be used in trial, their indentification of the perpetrator was more accurate
what did schacter et al (1991) study?
found elderly people had more difficulty remembering the source of information than young people, making their EWT more prone to inaccuracy
what did bekerian and bowers (1983) study?
gave participants questions either consistent or inconsistent with a scene viewed, when later asked questions about it in a different order, those exposed to inconsistent questions showed less accurate recall , but when asked in the same order, no difference in accuracy was found
