Eyewitness Testimony

Witness questioning also plays an important factor within an eyewitness testimony.  Particular attention needs to be placed on the wording within questions as one term may produce a different response to that of another.  Loftus carried out two studies into the roles of leading questions and what effect they have on p’s.  In the first study, Loftus showed p’s a film of a car accident.  A group of nine p’s were then asked ‘How fast were the cars going when they hit each other?’ An equal number of the remaining p’s were asked the same question but the verb ‘hit’ was replaced with either ‘smashed’, ‘collided’, ‘bumped’ or ‘contacted’.  It was found that the verb used effected the speed estimation.  In a similar study, film footage of a car accident was shown to a group of p’s who were then asked ‘Did you see a broken headlight?’ or ‘Did you see the broken headlight?’  Loftus found that p’s who had been asked ‘Did you see the broken headlight?’ were much more likely to say they had than the other group even though the footage contained no evidence of there being a broken headlight.  These studies both lead to the idea that leading questions can cause a memory to be distorted and therefore inaccurate.  Leading questions are a post event factor and would cause the memory to be distorted after the event had occurred.

False memories can also lead an eyewitness to produce a false statement and these memories can be a product of a leading question.

Loftus discovered that emotional factors can also have a role in an eyewitness’s accuracy.  She carried out a study aiming to discover whether anxiety would have an effect on p’s accuracy of identification of a face.  She carried out the study under two conditions.  The first condition contained no weapon and the p’s overheard a low key discussion whereas the second condition involved the p’s hearing a heated row and a man appearing from the lab covered in blood with a paperknife in his hand.  The findings were that in condition two the man was only accurately identified 33% of the time compared to 49% in condition one.  This may have been due to the idea of weapon focus.  This study suggests that eyewitnesses may give an inaccurate identification if they were not focusing properly on the victim/offender.