Corall Ogugua.
Seminar essay 3 - Eyewitness Testimony
Elizabeth Loftus has conducted many studies on eyewitness testimony (EWT).
In 1974 she worked with John Palmer to look at the ways that memory can be distorted. The studies general aim was to explore the accuracy of memory after witnessing a car accident. In particular it was to find out if leading questions distort the accuracy of eyewitness's immediate recall. It also aimed to see if it was true that people were open to hints, as people are extremely bad at estimating the speed of moving cars.
45 students were shown 7films of different traffic accidents. After each film, participants were given a questionnaire asking them to describe the accident and then answer a sequence of specific questions about it. The questionnaire contained one critical question 'about how fast were the cars going when they hit each other'. This was given to 1 group of participants. The other 4 groups were given different verbs to replace the word 'hit'.
Loftus and Palmer found that the group given the verb 'smashed' estimated a higher speed than the other groups. The group given verb 'contacted' estimated a lower speed than the other groups.
This research study shows us that leading questions can effect the accuracy of memory.
An additional explanation is that the shape of question actually alters the participant's memory account of the accident, which guides them to give a higher or lower estimate.
One criticism of this study is that it is not true to life. A laboratory experiment may not signify real life, as people may not take the experiment seriously and/or they are not emotionally aroused as they would be in a real life accident.
Another criticism of this study is that the ...
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This research study shows us that leading questions can effect the accuracy of memory.
An additional explanation is that the shape of question actually alters the participant's memory account of the accident, which guides them to give a higher or lower estimate.
One criticism of this study is that it is not true to life. A laboratory experiment may not signify real life, as people may not take the experiment seriously and/or they are not emotionally aroused as they would be in a real life accident.
Another criticism of this study is that the experimental design may have led to particular inevitable responses from participants. They may feel unsure about what to do and how to behave, and therefore would look for clues of what is expected from them.
In 1975 Loftus worked alone to conduct another study on EWT. She showed participants a short video of 8 demonstrators delivering a lecture. Participants were later given a questionnaire, containing the critical question: 'was the leader of the 4 (or 12) demonstrators a male?'. one week later participants were asked several questions including one about the number of demonstrators. Those who had been asked about 4 demonstrators gave a mean answer of 6.4, while those asked about 12 demonstrators gave a mean of 8.9. This further supports the idea that post-event information effects following recall.
In 1974 Loftus described a fabricated case to 50 students. A man and his granddaughter had been murdered during a robbery at a grocery store. On the evidence presented just 9 students thought the suspect was guilty. Yet, another group of 50 students was told that there was an eyewitness who could identify the suspect. 36 participants from this group said that the suspect was guilty. A third set of students was additionally told that the witness was not wearing his glasses during the crime and so was unlikely to have seen the suspects face clearly. This study emphasizes the
Corall Ogugua.
importance of finding out about the reliability of EWT.
In 1980 Buckhout did this. He conducted a study with 2,000 participants, who were shown a 13 second film on prime-time TV. Later an identity parade was shown on TV and viewers were invited to phone in their choice of suspect. Only 14% got it right. This study shows us that EWT can be very unreliable.
In 1999, Kebbel and Wagstaff found that witnesses were normally very accurate when describing a persons sex, racial background, style of clothing and hair colour, but less accurate when describing things like age, height and overall build. This suggests to us that memory for personal characteristics influence the accuracy of EWT. Other factors which influence the accuracy of EWT are the amount of time from when the event was observed, distance from the event, visibility of the event, obstructions between witness and event, familiarity with suspect and time between event and recall.
Even though most of the research has underlined the failure of EWT, research has also looked at how its accuracy can be improved. In 1985 Geiselman et al. reviewed the appropriate psychological literature on memory and connected this to the way in which interviews were conducted by the police in real life. They found, for example, that people remember events better when given retrieval cues, which could be achieved in the police interview by mentally re-establishing the context of the event being recalled. They also found that police interviewers often asked questions out of sequential order and often shifted from modality to another. Such measures had the effect of restricting the available retrieval cues for witnesses to accurately recall a person or event. Geiselman et al. developed an interviewing technique called the cognitive interview, which was based on verified psychological principles regarding effective memory recall. Though there are some problems with this technique, it does have a tendency to produce more detailed and accurate information than a standard police interview.
Overall, research has shown EWT to be very unreliable due to its accuracy. From looking at research by Loftus I feel that EWT is indeed undependable, and should therefore not be used as often as it is. However, Geiselman et al. have shown us a way in which we can improve it. Taking this into consideration, we are unable to come up with one single conclusion that states whether or not EWT deserves its frequent use and credibility.
