Eye Witness Testimony: Misleading Information
Memory
Key Names
Anastasi and Rhodes
Loftus and Palmer (1974) Gabbert et al (2003)
(2006)
Key Words
Eyes Witness testimony
Leading questions – Loftus and Palmer (1974)
–
People’s ability to Procedure – Student participants watched film clips of car accidents before giving them
remember details of an questions about the accidents. In the critical question, participants were asked to describe how
event which they fast the cars were travelling at the time of the crash. Five different groups had five different
observed. wordings of questions. The five different suggestive words used were hit, contacted, bumped,
collided and smashed.
Misleading information Finding – The mean estimated speed was calculated for each group. The verb contacted
– resulted in a mean estimate of 31.8 mph while smashed had a mean estimate of 40.5 mph. The
Incorrect information leading question affected the eye-witness testimony.
given to eyewitnesses, Why do Leading Questions affect EWT?
usually after the event.
Response-bias explanation – Wording of the question has no real effect on the participants’
Leading question – memories, but just influences how the answer is decided. The word encourages an answer but
A question which, doesn’t affect the actual memory itself.
because of the way it is Substitution explanation – The wording actually changed the participants memory. In a second
phrased, suggests a experiment, participants who heard smashed were more likely to report seeing broken glass.
certain answer. Post-event discussion – Gabbert et al.
Post-event discussion – Procedure – Studied participants in pair. Each participant watched a video of the same crime
Occurs when there is from different POVs. Each participant could see different elements of the crime. The participants
more than one witness to then discussed what they had seen before individually completing a test of recall.
the event. Discussion may Findings – Found that 71% of participants mistakenly recalled aspects of event that they didn’t
affect accuracy of recall. see in their video but were in their partners. In the control group, where there was no discussion,
this happened in 0%. It was concluded that witnesses often go along with each other, either for
social approval or because they believe the other witnesses are right and they are wrong. They
called this memory conformity.
Evaluation
Useful real-life applications – Loftus (1975) believes leading questions can have such a
distorting effect on memory that police officers need to be very careful about how they phrase
their questions when interviewing eyewitnesses.
Artificial tasks – Watching clips of an accident or a crime is very different from actually being
there as the crime occurs. There is evidence that emotions can have an effect on memory as
well. This decreases the reliability of these studies.
Individual differences – Anastasi and Rhodes (2006) found that people in age groups 18-25
and 35-45 were more accurate than people in the group 55-78. However, all age groups were
more accurate when identifying people of their own age group (own age bias). Research studies
often use younger people as the target to identify and this may mean that some age groups
appear less accurate but in fact this is not true.
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