To what extent has psychological research shown eyewitness testimony to be unreliable?

Authors Avatar

To what extent has psychological research shown eyewitness testimony to be unreliable?

Eyewitness testimony is the evidence that is provided by individuals whom have witnessed an event, crime or happening.  EWT relies solely on recall from memory and normally includes accounts of events and descriptions of persons involved.  Although EWT is used largely by the police on identifying suspects of a crime, giving great cause for concern over policing methods in our society.  It has been proven by psychologists not to be entirely reliable.  It has also been shown that it is not the witness themselves that are unreliable but more so the methods used by professionals to obtain testimonial statements.

The main issue concerned with the unreliability of EWT lies in the effect of language.  A school of thought is provoked by the studies of Elizabeth Loftus.  She has carried out various experiments concerned with leading questions and language.  She believes that the language used when questioning witnesses may lead them to give a certain answer.  In 1974 Loftus and Palmer studied EWT by showing participants films of a multiple car crash.  After watching the film they were then asked questions including “How fast do you think the cars were going when they hit?”  In some cases the word hit was replaced other nouns such as smashed, collided, bumped or contacted.  Also, a week later they were asked if they had seen any broken glass, there was in fact no broken glass shown on the films.  From this study it was found that participants who were asked the speed when the cars smashed said higher speeds than the participants questioned with less harsh nouns.  Also, more participants in the smashed condition claimed to have seen broken glass.  Loftus and Palmer concluded that leading questions can affect the accuracy of witnesses’ accounts of events.

Join now!

Their study showed that eyewitness memory is very fragile and can easily be distorted by events that happen after the incident (post-event information), and the change of only one word in a question can have a huge effect on the participants memory.  This has great implications for the questioning in police interviews as it can lead to confabulated evidence

Although this study suggests that EWT is unreliable the criticisms it received do not necessarily suggest this.  The fact that this was an artificial experiment in which a video was used suggests it is not as emotionally arousing as ...

This is a preview of the whole essay