Misleading information

• What are leading questions?

  a question which suggests a certain answer
• who were the key psychologists for leading question evidence?

  loftus and palmer 1974
• what did loftus and palmer do?

  • participants watched clip of car accidents
  • asked participants a leading question.
• what was the leading question in loftus and palmers experiment?

  about how fast were the cars going when they hit each other
• what were the different verbs in the leading question in the loftus and palmer experiment?

  • contacted
  • bumped
  • collided
  • smashed
• what were the findings?

  the mean estimated speed for the verb contacted was 31.8 mph.

  It was 40.5 mph for the verb smashed
• what are the 2 explanations to why leading questions affect EWT?

  • response bias explanation
  • substitution explanation
• explain the response bias explanation?

  the wording of the question has no effect on participants‘ memories but just influence how they decide to answer.
• explain the substitution explanation?

  wording of a leading question can change participants‘ memory
• what is post-event discussion?

  when witnesses discuss a crime with each other, leading to the contamination of EWT as they combine (mis) information from others with their own memories
• who was the key psychologists for the post event discussion experiment?

  gabbart et al 2003
• describe the grabbert et al 2003 procedure

  • ppts in pairs
  • each participant watched a video of the same crime but at different angles.
  • both participants discussed what they had seen.
  • individually completed a recall test
• what did gabbert et al 2003 find?

  • 71% of ppts mistakenly recalled aspects of the event That they did not see in the video but picked up from the discussion.
  • In the control group, there was no discussion and 0% was mistakenly recalled.
• what is memory conformity?

  witnesses often go along with each other to win social approval or because they believe the other witnesses are right