misleading information: post-event discussion and leading Q's Flashcards
what is a leading question?
a question that due to the way it has been phrased, suggests a certain answer.
Why do leading questions affect EWT?
-Response bias- the wording doesn’t have any real effect on their memories it just encourages them to answer accordingly.
-Substitution explanation- suggests the wording actually changes their memory
outline the key study of misleading Q’s LOFTUS AND PALMER:
45 students
-asked to watch a video clip car accidents and then asked questions.
-ONE critical leading question “How fast were the cars going when they __ into each other?”
Blank space was filled with ‘crashed, collided, bumped, contacted.’
FINDINGS:
-verb ‘contacted’ produced lowest estimated speed 31.8
-verb ‘smashed’ produced highest estimated speed 40.5
what is post-event discussion?
when there is more than one witness at an event, and they may discuss what they have witnessed which affects accuracy of each witnesses test of the event.
why does post-event discussion effect EWT?
-memory contamination: discussion causes EWT to become altered or distorted as they combine mis-info from other witnesses with their own memory
-memory conformity: they may go along with other witnesses to win social approval or because they believe they are right and we are wrong.
outline the key study of post-event discussion GABBERT
studied participants in PAIRs
-each ppt watched a video of the same crime (a girl stealing) but filmed from diff POV’s.
-both then discussed what they’d seen before individually completing a test of recall.
a CONTROL group was present where there was no discussion.
FINDINGS:
-in PE discussion group, 71% mistakenly recalled aspects of the event they didn’t see.
-in the control group, 0% recalled things they didn’t see.
one strength of research into misleading info is that it has PRACTICAL use in the real world. This is because..
inaccurate EWT can have v serious consequences. Loftus believed leading Q’s can have a DISTORTING effect on memory and WARNS police officers to be careful with their questions during EWT’s.
this has therefore lead to practical application of the COGNITIVE INTERVIEW which avoids leading q’s, enhancing ACCURACY of ewt’s.
One limitation is that the research into EWT used ARTIFICIAL TASKS as..
Loftus and Palmer’s participants watched film clips of car accidents which is DIFF to witnessing a real one (lack of stress.)
This means the task had LOW mundane realism, and the findings tell us LITTLE about how leading q’s effect ewt in REAL life cases.
therefore this may suggest that IRL cases, ewt may be diff due to OTHER factors like stress, and these studies could be too PESSIMISTIC.
a limitation of the memory conformity explanation of p.e.d
(That witnesses go along with each other for social approval or because they believe the other is correct) is that p.e.d actually ALTERS the ewt, where the theory claimed it remained UNCHANGED.
participants were shown video footage, and then discussed their findings and the results showed a BLEND between the two reports back, on what they had actually seen and what they had heard from other ppts.
therefore this suggests that memory is DISTORTED through contamination by misleading p.e.d, and NOT rather than a result of memory CONFORMITY, where we would expect the answer to change completely to the other ppt.
a 2nd limitation into the research of ewt is potential DEMAND CHARACTERISTICS…
many ppts often show d.c.’s in LAB studies, which become confounding variables.
some researchers argue most answers given in lab study are a RESULT of d.c’s as they want to appear HELPFUL and ATTENTIVE in order to not let the researcher down -social desirability bias.
therefore, d.c.’s are a LIMITATION of research into ewt, because the ppts are recalling INACCURATE info which becomes a CONFOUNDING variable, lowering the IV.
therefore we may not be measuring the TRUE impact of misleading info on the accuracy of ewt, as intended.
