Discuss Research into the Influence of Misleading Information on the Accuracy of Ewt

Discuss research into the influence of misleading information on the accuracy of EWT ( 12 marks)

Eye witness testimony is a legal term that refers to the use of a witness to give evidence in court concerning the identity of someone suspected of committing a crime. There are three stages to eye witness testimony, encoding, retain and retrieve. There are researches which show how misleading information can deter the accuracy of eye witness testimony (EWT)

Loftus and Palmer (1974) did two experiments. This first experiment was to investigate how information provides to witnesses after an incident will influence their memory of the event. 45 student participants were shown a short video clip of a car collision. The 45 people were then split into 9 groups. They were then asked 'About how fast were the cars going when they hit _______ each other' each group had then been given a different verb to fill in the blank. The different verbs being, 'smashed', 'contacted', 'hit', 'bumped' and 'collided'. In this case the independent variable had been the verb used and the dependent variable was the estimate speed of the car for each verb. The results showed that when the verb 'smashed' had been used the mean estimate of speed was 40.8 mph whilst when the verb 'contacted' was used the mean speed was 31.8 mph. This showed that information after an event could alter and change the memory of that event.

The second experiment was when 150 participants were shown a short video of a multi vehicle car accident and then the participants were asked questions about it. The participants were split into 3 groups of 50. The first group was asked 'how was were the cars going when they hit each other', the second group was asked 'how fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other' and the last group was not asked about the speed of the car. A week later all the participants returned and were asked 'did you see any broken glass?' However there had been no broken glass in the film. The results show that the verb used in the original question influenced whether the participants thought they had seen broken glass or not. It showed that 16 people thought there was smashed glass when the verb 'smashed' was used whilst compared to the 7 people who thought there was smashed glass when the verb 'hit' was used. The 2nd experiment supports the first that leading questions can cause memory distortion.

The memory of an event might become contaminated through the discussing events with others or being questioned multiple times. This is called post event discussion. Gabbert (2003) employed a novel procedure to examine the effects of misinformation. In the study they used younger participants of the age 18-30 and older participants of the age 60-80. They were both shown a video of the same crime scene, the crime film had been the same exact one however they were shown different angles of the film. This was done to stimulate different witness perspectives. The participants were then asked to recall the event either by