Misleading information

Misleading information

1. Loftus Palmer (aim)- they wanted to investigate the effect of misleading information on someones account of eyewitness testimony.

2. Process- they had 45 students, in a lab environment with 5 conditions. Independent groups design so they only take part in one condition. They were shown the same video of two cars in a crash, they were presented with different verbs ranging from 'contacted', and 'smashed'. Loftus and Palmer wanted to then understand the effect these verbs would have on the students speed estimate the cars were travelling.

3. They found that those who were asked with the aggressive verb estimated a higher speed the cars were going than those presented with a less aggressive like 'hit'. Therefore, showing that misleading information (leading questions) can impact on a person's account of an event.

4. Evaluation of study- The experiment lacks mundane realism, in actually seeing a car crash a person will have an emotional impact to watching a real-life accident. Therefore, the study has low ecological validity.

   • Another weakness of the study is that it involves students, it isn't representative of all people and so is hard to generalise the findings to the general population. Students may be less confident in their abilities to estimate speeds , meaning they may be more influenced by the verbs.
   • A strength of the experiment is that it was conducted in a lab, meaning it has good control over variables and so is internally valid. Because of the fact it was so highly controlled it means it can be replicated easily. It was a standardised procedure. This could be beneficial to carry out the experiment on older people and see if they had the same results as with the students.