misleading information - evaluation

Question 1

Research into misleading information has real-life applications

Answer 1

• Practical uses for police officers and investigators
  Led to police officers changing their techniques in order to avoid the effect of misleading info
• Highlighting misleading information as a negative factor in EWT has led to new techniques designed to improve memory retrieval, such as the cognitive interview (avoids leading questions)
• reduces the consequence of inaccurate EWT on people

Question 2

Loftus and Palmer’s study is a laboratory experiment

Answer 2

which followed a standardised procedure
- so it is easy to replicate (high internal validity)

Question 3

real life application

criminal justice system

Answer 3

• There is a large base of evidence suggesting that misleading information can lead to EWT inaccuracy, which has raised awareness that the criminal justice system cannot always rely on EWT as a basis for convictions

Question 4

Loftus and Palmer’s study used artificial materials

Answer 4

• There’s a low level of mundane realism since if these Ps did witness a crash in real life, they would be more emotionally aroused which would affect the results
• Yuille and Cutshall (1986) found that witnesses of a traumatic real armed robbery had very accurate recall after four months

Question 5

EWT research studies lack external validity

Answer 5

• Laboratory experiments have low ecological validity and therefore cannot be generalised
• Real eyewitnesses may search their memory with more effort because their testimony may lead to a successful conviction → this is not true in research studies

Question 6

There may be individual differences in accuracy of EWT

Answer 6

• Anastasi and Rhodes (2006) found that older people were less accurate than younger people when giving eyewitness reports

Question 7

Lab studies of EWT suffer from demand characteristics

Answer 7

they couldn’t identify the true speed on a video therefore they may have used the verbs to make a decision