misleading information

misleading information

1. leading questions

   • Loftus and palmer 1974
   • participants watched film clips of a car accident and answered questions about it
     • leading question - about how fast was the car going when they (hit, contacted, bumped, collided, smashed) each other
   • findings
     • verb contacted - 31.8 mph
     • verb smashed - 40.5 mph
     • shows leading question biased the eyewitness recall

2. response bias explanation

   • the wording of the question has no real effect on the participant's memories but influences how they decode to answer the question
     • smashed encouraged a higher speed
   • substitution explanation
     • conducted 2nd experiment participants who heard smashed were more likely to report seeing broken glass than those who heard hit
       • leading verb changed their memory of the incident

3. post-event discussion

   • studied participants in pairs where each participant watched the same clip but from different perspectives
     • both participants discussed what they had seen and individually completed a test of recall
   • findings
     • 71% recalled vents/aspects of the video they didn't watch compared to 0% in the control group
     • concluded that witnesses often go along with each other either to win social approval or believe the otehr witness is right (memory conformity)
   • Gabbert 2003

4. evaluation

   • real life application
     • loftus 1975 suggested leading questions can have a distorting effect on memory and police officers need to be careful about how they phrase questions. this has practical applications as it can improve the way the legal; system works by psychologists appearing in court as expert witnesses
   • artificial tasks
     • participants watched film clips and so didn't feel the emotional feeling such as stress of witnessing a real accident and some evidence suggests emotions have an influence on memory. this is a limitation as artificial tasks tell us little about how leading questions affect EWT in real incidents. this makes researchers pessimistic about the accuracy of EWT
   • individual differences
     • evidence suggests that older epople are less accurate than younger when giving eyewitness reports. Anastasia and Rhodes 2006 put peole into age groups (18-25, 33-45) and found the younger groups were more accurate than the older (55-78). however all age groups were more accurate when identifying own age groups (own age bias). research studies often use younger people other than older who appear less accurate which isnt true