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Eye Witness Testimony - Coggle Diagram

- - - - showed white participants pictures of a white man with a razor threatening a black man on the subway
      - tended to recall the black threatening the white
      - Normalising
    - - showed participants a video of a woman having dinner with her husband in a restaurant
      - 0.5 participants told she was a waitress, 0.5 told she was a librarian
      - participants were more likely to remember schema consistent information:
        
        librarian = better memory that she spent the day reading + likes classical music
        
        waitress = better rmb that she was drinking and eating a burger
    - - memory was better for schema-relevant than schema-irrelevant facts
        
        brightness of robbers' clothes vs bank manager's clothes
      - even if the fact was not typical / predictable by the schema (contradicting Bartlett)
      - but ambiguous facts tended to follow the schema profile
- - - - significantly shorter
      - much of the details were lost
        
        seal hunting -> fishing
        
        canoes -> boats
        
        white participants can't register native language as not in their schemas
        
        structure altered to become more westernised
        
        details of typical Native Indian culture were left out
      - some details were changed
    - - remembering involves a search for meaning, an effort to make events coherent and logical to the listener
      - as the story did not make sense to the English participants, they distorted it to make sense of the story
  - - - whenever we try to remember something, we fit it into our schemas - the way we most comfortably understand
- - - - memories can be fragile
      - more trivial items can easily be distorted by leading questions (retroactive interference)
      - key items might be harder to distort (e.g. wepaons)
      - the police needs to be extremely careful when questioning suspects, especially if they already have a theory of what might've happened