Misleading information

• What is misleading information?

  - Information that is given to an eyewitness which may change or contaminate their memory of the event

  - E.g. Leading questions, post-event discussion
• Loftus and Palmer

  • Arranged for 45 PPs to watch film clips of car accidents and then asked them questions about the accident
  • In the critical question PPs were asked to describe how fast the cars were travelling: ‘About how fast were the cars going when they ___ each other?’ There were five groups of participants and each group was given a different verb in the critical question. One group had the verb hit, the others had contacted, bumped, collided, smashed
• Findings of Loftus and Palmer

  • The mean estimated speed was calculated for each participant group
  • The verb contacted resulted in a mean estimated speed of 31.8 mph (lowest)
  • The verb smashed, the mean was 40.5 mph (highest)
  • The leading question biased the eyewitness’s recall of an event
• Research on Post Event Discussion

  • Gabbert studied participants in pairs
  • Each participant watched a video of the same crime, but filmed from different points of view
  • This meant that each participant could see elements in the event that the other could not
  • Only one of the participants could see the title of a book being carried by a young woman
  • Both participants then discussed what they had seen before completing a test of recall
• Findings on research on Post Event Discussion

  • The researchers found that 71% of the participants mistakenly recalled aspects of the event that they did not see in the video but had picked up in the discussion
  • In a control group where there was no discussion overlap was 0%
  • This was evidence of memory conformity
• What occurs as a result of post event discussion?

  • Memory contamination- when co-witnesses to a crime discuss it with each other their eyewitness testimonies may become altered or distorted
  • This is because they combine information from other witnesses with their own memories.
  • Memory conformity- Gabbert concluded that witnesses often go along with each other either to win social approval or because they believe the other witnesses are right and they are wrong
  • Unlike with memory contamination the actual memory is unchanged
• AO3 Misleading Info: Real World Application

  • Has important practical uses in the criminal justice system
  • The consequences of inaccurate EWT can be very serious
  • Leading questions can have such a distorting effect on memory that police officers need to be very careful about how they phrase their questions when interviewing eyewitnesses
  • Improve the way the legal system works especially by protecting innocent people from faulty convictions
• AO3 Misleading Info: Counterpoint to Application

  • The practical applications of EWT may be affected by issues with research
  • Loftus and Palmer’s PPs watched clips in a lab a very different experience from witnessing a real event (less stressful)
  • What eyewitnesses remember has important consequences in the real world but PPs responses in research do not matter in the same way so research PPs are less motivated to be accurate
  • Researchers are too pessimistic about the effects of misleading information and EWT may be more dependable than many studies suggest
• AO3 Misleading Info: Evidence challenging memory conformity

  • Post-event discussion actually alters EWT
  • Researchers showed their PPs film clips and there were two versions a robber’s hair was dark brown and it was light brown
  • PPs discussed the clips in pairs each having seen different versions
  • They did not report what they had seen or what they heard from the co-witness but a ‘blend’ of the two (e.g. an answer to the hair question ‘medium brown’)
  • Memory itself is distorted through contamination by misleading post-event discussion rather than the result of memory conformity
• AO3 Misleading Info: Demand Characteristics

  • Lab studies have identified misleading information as a cause of inaccurate EWT due to controlling variables
  • Some argue that many answers given by participants in lab studies are due to demand characteristics
  • Participants usually want to be helpful and not let the researcher down so they guess when they are asked a question they don’t know the answer to