Evaluation

• One strength of misleading information is that research support can be applied to real life situations such as the criminal justice system . The consequences of inaccurate EWT can be very serious as lofts believes that leading questions can have a distorting effect on memory. So police offers must be careful when phrasing their questions when interviewing eyewitnesses. For this reason psychologists are used to act as expert witnesses in court trails and explain the limits of EWT to juries. This shows that psychologists can help to improve the way the legal system works, especially by protecting innocent people from faulty convictions based on unreliable EWT.
• A weakness of lotus and Palmer’s investigation of the effects of leading questions on EWT is that the study Lacks external validity. As the co witness group witnessed different perspectives of the same crime from start to finish in the video. This cannot be generalised to real life settings as witnesses would rarely see the whole event in a real-life situation. Zaragoza and mcCloskey argues that participants answers in lab studies are due to demand characteristics because they want to be helpful and not let the researcher down.
• A strength of gabberts research on the effects of post event discussion on the accuracy of EWT has good population validity. This is because he used a sample of 2 different populations uni students and old people and found little difference in their answers. This means that post event discussion affects older people and younger people. loftus and palmer research on the effects of leading questions on EWT has poor population validity as he used a sample of American students and is culture biased and it is arguably that the students in the experiment were less experienced drivers therefore less accurate at estimating speed. Consequently the results cannot be generalised to other populations like older and more experienced drivers who may be more accurate in their judgment of speeds and not as susceptible to leading questions we also do not know if people in the UK or Europe would be susceptible to leading questions.
• Loftus and Palmer’s research took place in a laboratory of Washington University and was therefore highly controlled. This high degree of control reduces the chance of extraneous variable, increasing the validity of the results. Furthermore, it is easy for psychologists to replicate their research, to see if the same results are achieved with a different population.
• A limitation is that there is evidence against memory conformity as an explanation that post event discussion alters EWT. Skagberg and wright showed participants of a film of a mugger there were 2 versions version 1 the mugger had dark brown hair and version 2 had light down hair. The participants then discussed their clips in pairs and found that participants didn’t report what they saw from the other co witnesses but blended the 2 versions reporting medium brown hair this suggests that memory itself is distorted through contamination rather than memory conformity.
• A limitation of the substitution bias as an explanation for leading questions is that there is research to go against it. Sutherland and Hayne showed participants a video clip and were later asked misleading questions to cause substitution bias.the results showed that participants were most accurate recalling central details compared to peripheral details eg the wall colour or type of lamp presumably because participants had focused on central details of the event. An accurate version of memory was maintained therefore the substitution explanation is wrong because it would have predicted an equally bad recall for central and peripheral details.