Factors Affecting Eye Witness Testimony
Eyewitness Testimony
An eyewitness testimonies are the ability to remember the details of a key event – accident or crimes that they have observed first hand. Misleading information can cause eyewitness testimonies can be effects, misleading information is where incorrect information given to an eyewitness usually after the event that can influence their ability to accurately recall an event.
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Leading questions can effect the reliability of eyewitness testimonies. A leading question is where a question that is phrased in a certain way that suggests a certain answer. Certain phrases or words are included in the question that can lead someone to think in a certain way.
This was researched by Loftus and Palmer. Their participants watched a clip of a car accident. They then asked a critical question (leading question) – they had to describe how fast the car was travelling. The 5 groups of participants all given a different verb, e.g. hit, contacted, collided, smashed. They found that the mean estimated speed for contacted was 31 mph, mean estimated speed for smashed was 40 mph. In conclusion, the leading question biased the participants eyewitness recall of the event, and can create a desired response in participants.
Another way that eyewitness testimonies can be effected is through post event discussion. This is when co-witnesses of a crime discuss what they saw with each other when witnessing the crime, this then means the testimonies may become contaminated. This occurs because misinformation from other witnesses is combined with their own memories.
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This was researched by Gabbert. He studied participants in pairs. Each participant watched a video of the same crime, but filmed from different points of view- each participant saw something slightly different in the crime scene. Both participant in the pairing then discussed what they had seen before they carried out an individual recall test. He found that 71% of participants recalled aspects of the event that they had not seen in the video but picked up in the discussion. In the control group where there was no discussion 0% of the participants recalled incorrect details of the event. Gabbert named this process as memory conformity – people will go along with others to either win social approval or because they feel that the other person is correct.
EVALUATION
The tasks used to study the effects of EWT are artificial. In Loftus and Palmers study participants watched film clips of car accidents. This is a very different experience to actually witnessing an accident first hand as there are many variables that could affect recall when witnessing a real accident, e.g. emotions like stress or shock. This is a limitation for the research into misleading information because using artificial tasks tell us very little about the responses people have when they are a witness of an incident in real life situations. Therefore, this means that the research into the effects of misleading information on EWT lacks ecological validity because the tasks used to measure this effect are not representative of real life.
Individual differences are not considered in the effects of misleading information on EWT. It has been found in other research that old people have less accurate eye witness reports. Anastasi and Rhodes (2006) found that people aged 18-25 and 35-45 were more accurate than people aged 55-78. This is a limitation because many research studies into EWT used younger participants, so there is a sample bias issue with EWT research and means that the research is not representative of EWT in all age groups. Therefore, this means that when trying to understand how misleading information can affect EWT, there is a lack of research that looks into the impact of age on the accuracy of EWT.