"It is clear that eyewitness testimony is entirely unreliable".To what extent does psychological research support this view on eyewitness testimony?

AS and A Level Psychology

“It is clear that eyewitness testimony is entirely unreliable”.

To what extent does psychological research support this view on eyewitness testimony?

18 marks

Plan – Studies which back up this view

Loftus and Palmer 1974

Loftus et al. 1987

Loftus and Burns 1982

Wagenaar and Groeneweg 1990

False memory syndrome

Registration

Expectations etc.

Registration

Witness factors/event factors?

With regard to the extent of psychological research which supports the view concerning the unreliability of eyewitness testimony, a number of judgements can be made.

Firstly, one can refer to a study carried out by Loftus and Palmer in 1974, where one hundred and fifty participants were asked to watch a video of cars colliding, and then fill in a questionnaire about what they saw. The important question involved the speed of the cars at the point of impact. However, the question was phrased differently for different groups of participants. Some were asked “How fast were the two cars going when they hit each other”; others were asked the same question but with the word “smashed”, “collided”, “bumped” or “contacted” replacing the word “hit”. It was found that the speed at which the participants thought the cars were going was affected by the verb used in the question. Overall, we can sum up that recall can be distorted by the wording of the question. The study proves that eyewitness testimony can often be inaccurate, and brings in the idea of false memory syndrome. This is the act of being unsure of details, which leads us to estimate values, often incorrectly. Some words I feel imply speed more than others, and act as leading questions. For example, the questions influenced the answers given by participants, demonstrating how recall can be biased by language or schema. The study also reveals how police questioning can really have a dramatic effect on how a witness remembers an event.

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A second study which challenges the reliability of eyewitness testimony is the Loftus et al. study which was carried out in 1987. Participants were shown one of two versions of a restaurant scene on video. In one version, a man pointed a gun at the cashier and she gave him money. In the other version, he gave her a cheque, and she gave him money. Participants in the “weapon” version fixated more on the gun than those seeing the “non-weapon” version. Their recall for other details was also poorer, and they were less able to identify the man from a set of photographs. From this study, we can come to the conclusion that a salient detail such as a gun can focus attention, and so lead to poorer recall for other details of the event. In other words, participants seem to remember the most important details the most, and will focus all their attention on salient details like the gun (weapon focus), and miss out on other significant details of the situation.

A third study one can take into consideration is the Loftus and Burns study, which was carried out in 1982 and portrays evidence that the violence of an event can also affect recall. Participants were shown one of two versions of a simulated armed robbery on video. One version included a scene of a boy being shot in the face while the robbers were making their getaway. The recall of detail of the event was much higher for participants who had seen the “non-violent” version had less accurate and less complete recall, not only for event immediately before the shooting, but also for events up to two minutes earlier. The shock associated with the “violent” event disrupted the processing of information into memory, and its consolidation.

Eyewitness memory for details of an event can be affected at the registration stage by witness factors and event factors. Witness factors include age, stress and expectations. For example, several studies have shown that children typically give fewer details about an event they have witnessed than adults. Similarly, List (1986) found that older people may also recall less than younger people. In addition, even though a high level of arousal (stress) would increase your level of performance, too much arousal would lower it. That is to say that a very frightened person will start to repress memories and force them to the back of their mind where they can never be retrieved again.

Information is lost with the passage of time, which can be explained by the trace decay theory of forgetting. Over time, “basic” information is retained, especially from a significant event. Much of the detail is lost, and misleading information is typically given after an event if participants are able to recall this new information as if they’d seen it. However, this might only be partial. As with the influence of exposure time on memory, this too was demonstrated by Ebbinghaus (1885). It has also been shown in a naturalistic study of long term forgetting, carried out by Wagenaar and Groeneweg in1990. Seventy-eight survivors of the concentration camp, Camp Erika, were interviewed between 1984 and 1987 about their camp experiences. The information they gave was compared with earlier evidence they had given just after the end of the war. There was general agreement in the later interviews on basic information. All but three of the thirty-eight people who had been tortured by the camp commandant, for example, remembered his name. However, much of the detail had been lost. In conclusion, while basic information may be well remembered over time, details tend to be forgotten.

On the whole, storage factors can affect recall. Basic information is often retained, but detailed information is lost over time. Memory can be supplemented by later information. It can be distorted by misleading information, known as the misinformation effect. This can also lead to completely inaccurate information being given. The misinformation effect has been challenged in terms of whether it is the result of memory impairment of the effects of bias in the testing situation.