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Eyewitness testimony: Misleading information. - Coggle Diagram
Eyewitness testimony: Misleading information.
What is it?
Eye witness testimony is the evidence given by a witness to a significant event ie: a mugging.
Leading question can affect eye witness testimony.
Leading Question.
A leading question is a question which is asked in such a way to suggest an expected answer.
They can wrongly imply that something happened when it hasn't.
Research.
Loftus and Palmer 1974.
Wanted to investigate how leading questions affected recall. In this case the speed of a vehicle.
Procedure:
45 students were shown seven films of different traffic accidents.
After the film they were given a questionnaire which asked them to describe the accident and answer a set of questions.
The critical question was 'HOW FAST WERE THE CARS GOING WHEN THEY HIT EACH OTHER'.
However, the word 'HIT' was replaced with either smashed, collided, bumped or contacted depending on which group the [participant was in.
The change in verb suggested the answer that a participant might give.
Findings:
The findings show that the leading questions affect the response given by participants.
As the increased aggression in the verb increased so did the mean speed estimate.
Verb
Smashed = 40.8
Collided = 39.3
bumped = 38.1
hit = 34.1
contacted = 31.8
Second part of experiment.
Participants where asked one week later whether they saw any broken glass.
The participants who originally heard the verb 'smashed' were more likely to report broken glass even through there was none.
This shows hoe misleading information can change the way information is recalled and stored.
Research on post-event discussion.
Eyewitnesses to a crime may sometimes discuss their experiences and memories with each other. The following experiment explores the effect of such PED.
Procedure.
Fiona Gabbert et al 2003.
She studied participants in pairs.
Each participant watched a video of the same crime but filmed from different points of view.
This meant each participant could see elements in the event that the other could not.
Both participants then discussed what they had seen before individually completing a test of recall.
Findings:
The researches found that 71% of the participants mistakenly recalled aspects of the event that they did not see in the video but instead in the discussion.
The mistakenly recalling did not happen in the control group where there was no discussion.
Evaluation.
Research.
Research is scientific.
The study was done in a highly controlled lab setting, which allowed for the researcher to have high control over extraneous variables.
The lab setting means the researcher could replicate the study.
However...
The study lacks ecological validity as they are done in an artificial setting.
You would have to generalise to real life situations.
Real life application.
Loftus 1975 believes that leading question can have such a distorting effect on memory that police officers need to be very careful about how they phrase their questions.
Evidence challenging memory conformity.
Another limitation of the memory conformity explanation is evidence that post event discussion actually alters EWT.
Skagerbergand Wright 2008
They showed their participants film clips.
There were two versions.
Mugger's hair was dark brown.
Mugger's hair was light brown.
The participants discussed the clips in pairs.
They often reported what they heard not what they saw or a blend of both ie: medium brown.
This suggest hat the memory itself is distorted through contamination by leading post0 event discussion, rather than the result of memory conformity.
Evidence against substitution.
One limitation of the substitution explanation is that EWT is more accurate for some aspects of an event than for others.
Sutherland and Hayne 2001.
Showed participants a video clip. When participants were later asked misleading questions, their recall was more accurate for central details of the evetnt than for peripheral ones.
This suggests that the original memories for the central details survived and were not distorted, an outcome that is not predicted by substitution explanation.