Condition 1: How fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?
Condition 2:How fast were the cars going when they collided into each other?
Condition 3: How fast were the cars going when they bumped into each other?
Condition 4: How fast were the cars going when they hit each other?
Condition 5: How fast were the cars going when they contacted each other?
As the verb in the critical question changed the miles per hour (mph) for each verb produced different responses. Smashed produced the fastest speed being 40.8 mph and contacted made the car accident seem slower as the respondents said the cars were going at a rough speed of 31.8 mph. An explanation for this was given as being the verb in the question obviously distorted the memory of an individual’s recollection of the crash. The second experiment they conducted was also a laboratory one. It was being used in order to back up their findings from the first study. A sample of 150 students were used and split into three different conditions. Similarly to the first study the participants were asked to watch a short film clip of a car accident. Two of the conditions were asked about the speed of the cars once again using the verbs hit and smashed as before. The last group was not interrogated on the speeds of the cars. A week later participants returned and asked if they saw any broken glass when in fact there was no broken glass in the film. In the smashed condition participants saw significantly more broken glass than any other verb or change in wording. 34% saw broken glass compared to 14% who did not. This developed the claim that the wording of a question in court can indeed affect the cognition of an individual’s recollection of events just by a simple change of wording. In court this can affect an eyewitnesses recall of an event and make it 100% wrong despite them being 100% confidant. It is thought of that memory is like a camera, which takes snapshots in our mind of what really happened. However this is not true however because memory s susceptible to both deterioration and reconstruction.
B - Compare and contrast this method with one other method
One of the other ways in which experiments can become is a natural experiment. This is also called a quasi experiment and is where the experimenter cannot manipulate the IV. A quasi experimenter can use all sorts of means to conduct a quasi experiment, for instance observation as they have no control over the behaviours they are seeing (unless there are demand characteristics in which the participants see the observer and start acting differently). There are many strengths to a quasi experiment such as they are usually high in ecological validity because the observer has less control over the variables. However with natural experiments it is hard to determine the causation for some behaviour displayed. Natural experiments can also be field experiments sometimes as they involve the researcher going to a scene and observing the behaviours. As with the laboratory experiment there are high levels of control over the variables. With Loftus and Palmer we can see they had full control over which verb they used, groups they showed it too, and participants in which they chose to take part. However with the laboratory experiment there is more chance of demand effects as the participants are fully aware that they are taking part and therefore may act different and give answers they think the experimenter will want to hear therefore making the results useless as it is not a true interpretation of their behaviour. With the laboratory experiment there is low ecological validity because it is set in conditions not true to real life. The participants in Loftus and Palmer were shown a video of a car crash, and we can presume that their answers would have been different if the car crash was real and staged. Naturally occurring experiments usually take part outside of the laboratory and therefore are quite high in ecological validity. One problem with quasi experiments is that they do tend to go against a lot of ethics e.g. observation often requires consent, which in many cases does not get asked in fear of the results being changed with the behaviour of the participants. With eye witness testimony it is very hard to make a experiment which is ecologically valid and ethical making the main type of study used for these, laboratory experiments. In the courtroom, experiments cannot be staged unless often in the laboratory and it is very hard to catch a crime in action and observe it.
