To what extent does psychological research support the accuracy of eye witness testimony?

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To what extent does psychological research support the accuracy of eye witness testimony? (18 marks)

        Eye Witness Testimony is an area of research into a witness’ recollection of an event, (crime, act of violence, car crash), and the accuracy of their memory.  It can prove accurate and invaluable to police investigations but it is also fallible. This research studies what about the testimony is reliable, why errors are made and how to make them more reliable.  

  • Rattner reviewed 205 cases of “wrongful arrest” and found that in 52 % of cases, incorrect EWT had been to blame.  
  • This could be due to Bartlett’s theory of Reconstructive Memory. This is the idea that witnesses take original information (e.g. a folk story, as Bartlett studied in 1932), and use “effort after meaning” with their existing ideas, experience and cultural teachings (schemas).
  • Loftus said that certain situations improve the validity of EWT, which include proximity to the incident, racial similarities and the sobriety and emotional state of the witness.

There are a lot of studies finding errors in EWT - Elizabeth Loftus, in 1979, found that Weapon Focus in a hostile situation detracts the witness from the description of the accused.  Participants were exposed to two different situations, one being a minor argument in the adjacent room, a person then left that room covered in grease holding a pen.  The second group were exposed to a passionate and hostile argument in the room next door followed by the sound of crashing chairs and smashing glass, a man then leaves the room holding a knife covered in blood. The participants exposed to the extremely hostile situation could recognise the attacker roughly 20% less than those in the docile situation.  Loftus concluded by stating that the focus of a person in this situation narrows to the enhancement of central detail, (like the size and shape of the knife, whether the suspect had any rings) but is detrimental to peripheral details such as what colour hair the suspect had, or the colour of the walls in the room. This may be because the weapon is statistically infrequent, and represents a threat to an eyewitness’s life. The sight of a weapon in an attacker’s hand is enough to distract the eyewitness’s attention from description of the attacker and relay that attention to the weapon, therefore causing the eyewitness to have a poorer description of the attacker.

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Another theory for this reduction in recall could be List’s idea of high and low probability in EWT.  List asked a group of people to rate what probability different events had in a shoplifting scenario; she then showed each incident as a video to different participants, and one week later tested their recall. List found that people remembered high probability events better. However they included more errors and described events that had not actually occurred, they used their schemas. This may be because high probability events had already become related to the participant, this (according to research) makes it ...

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