eye witness testimony - misleading information

• eye witness

  someone who has seen or witnessed a crime usually present at the time of the incident and they use their memory of the crime to give their testimony or a reconstruction of what happened
• eyewitness testimony

  the evidence provided in court by a person who witnessed the crime, with a view to identifying the perpetrator and theory accuracy can be affected by factors such as misleading information and anxiety
• misleading information

  incorrect information given to eyewitnesses after the event which affects the accuracy of their testimony and it can take many forms
• leading question

  a question which because of its phrasing suggests a certain answer which can then affect the accuracy of the EWT
• post-event discussion

  when there is more than one eyewitness to the event, they may discuss what they have seen with each other or other people
• Loftus and Palmer (1974)

  • 45 students were shown 7 different traffic accidents and were asked a series if different questions
  • one was a critical question about how fast cars were going when they hit one another and in 4 other groups the verb was changed to bumped, collided, contacted, smashed - these were the leading questions
  • the mean estimated speed for contacted was 31.8 mph and for smashed was 40.5 mph. the leading question biased the eyewitnesses' recall of the event
  • response bias explanation - this is not because the wording had changed their memory; it just influenced on how they chose to answer
  • substitution explanation - the wording actually alters the participants' memory of the clip
• post-event discussion

  • when a witness to a crime discusses it with another witness or someone else
  • their eyewitness testimonies may become contaminated and therefore affects the accuracy of their recall of the event
  • this is because the witness combines (mis)information from other witnesses with their own memories
• Gabbert et al

  • participants were put into pairs where each partner watched a different video of the same event at a different angle so that they each viewed unique items
  • in condition 1, they were encouraged to discuss the event before each partner individually recalled the event they watched
  • 71% of the participants mistakenly recalled aspects of the event that they didn't see in the video but had picked up in the discussion
  • the corresponding figure in the control group, where there was no discussion, was 0%
  • witnesses often go along with each other, whether its to win social approval or because they believe the other witnesses were right and they are wrong
  • conformity
• stregths

  • college students who had visited Disneyland as children were asked evaluate advertising material about Disneyland containing misinformation about bugs bunny
  • participants assigned to the misleading group were more likely to report having shaken hands with the character than the control group (who had no misleading information)
  • research into EWT has been used to warn the justice system of problems with eyewitness identification evidence as recent DNA exoneration cases have confirmed the warnings of eyewitness researchers showing that mistaking eyewitness identification was the largest single factor contributing the conviction of these innocent people
• weaknesses

  • studies have found that compared to younger subjects, elderly people have difficulty remembering the source of their information, even through their memory for the information itself is not impaired - therefore they become more prone to the effect of misleading information when giving testimony
  • Foster (1994) found that if participant thought they were watching a real-life robbery (and thought their responses would influence the trial), their identification of the robber was more accurate
  • Cutshall also found that witnesses to an armed robbery in Canada gave very accurate reports of a crime 4 months after the event despite being given 2 misleading questions