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loftus and palmer evaluation essay (8)
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essay on the classic study for criminological psychology loftus and plamer (1974), including 2 PEEL paragraphs and a conclusion for top band marks
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Evaluate the classic study by Loftus and Palmer (1974). (8)One strength of Loftus and Palmer (1974) is that it has good internal validity.
The aim was to investigate whether leading questions would influence the
participants’ estimates of speed of the vehicle in the car crash. 45 students in total
were divided up into 5 groups of 9, and watched a short film clip of a car crash. Then,
the students had to complete a questionnaire, in which there was a critical question
about estimating the speed of the car before the car crash. Each group was exposed
to a different verb describing the collision between the cars, such as “smashed”, “hit,
or “contacted”. The critical question was randomly allocated among other questions.
This would have prevented the participants from guessing the aim of the study,
hence this minimises the likelihood of demand characteristics. This means that the
likelihood of the response given being due to the research methodology employed by
the study was lowered. This is a strength as it makes the experiment more internally
valid, implying that the estimates of speed of the participants can be relied on as it
was likely to be genuine. Regardless, students were tested, who had limited
experience of car speeds, therefore it may have been hard for them to accurately
distinguish the speed of the cars just from watching the film clip. This means that
they could have more likely been influenced by the verb used in the critical question
than if there were the case if a different population with more experience of driving
was used. This displays the limited generalizability of this sample of students to the
general population, in which the use of cars would be common. As a result, it is not
certain whether the use of leading questions would influence most people or just
students uncertain of the car speeds as they had little or no driving experience.
One weakness of Loftus and Palmer (1974) is that it has low ecological
validity. Findings show that the group expose to the verb “smashed” in the critical
question (“How fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other”)
estimated a higher speed of 40.5 mph compared to that estimated by the group
exposed to the verb “hit” in the critical question, which is 31.8 mph. From this it can
be concluded that the change in the word significantly affected the witness’s answer
to the question, as the wording might have caused a change in the memory of the
car crash, leading to them recalling it as being more severe than it really was. This
would indicate that leading questions have more effect on people who are uncertain
of their memory and have certain schemas which become easily activated by the
suggestible answer suggested by the leading question. However, the task of
watching a film clip is unlikely to induce the same emotional strain as that of an
eyewitness, hence lacking in mundane realism. This is because eyewitnesses in real
life are subject to high stress and arousal, which could also affect their recall and
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