EWT: Misleading Information

• Eyewitness testimony (EWT) is regularly a deciding factor for courts in the criminal justice system to ‘prove’ the guilt or innocence of the criminally accused.

  However, inaccuracies in EWT are common, accounting for about 75% of incorrect convictions later found to be innocent using DNA evidence.
• One factor that could negatively influence EWT accuracy is misleading information - i.e. any information that ‘leads’ you into giving a particular response, as opposed to a necessarily accurate response.
• The two types of misleading information are:

  • Leading questions - questions that suggest a desired answer
  • Post-event discussion – information given after an event with potential to influence memory of it (this includes leading questions)
• Loftus and Palmer (1974)

  Participants were shown videos of traffic collisions, and then given a questionnaire to test their immediate recall of the videos’ events.

  Among the questions was one critical question, “About how fast were the cars going when they hit each other?”. They replaced “hit” with either “contacted”, “collided”, “bumped” or “smashed”. The results found that vehicle speed estimates were fastest on average for participants given the “smashed” version, and slowest for participants given the “contacted” version.
• There is a large base of evidence suggesting that misleading information can lead to EWT inaccuracy, which has raised awareness that the criminal justice system cannot always rely on EWT as a basis for [sometimes incorrect] convictions.
• Highlighting misleading information as a negative factor in EWT has led to new techniques designed to improve memory retrieval, such as the cognitive interview developed by Geiselman and colleagues.
• Laboratory experiments may have low external validity (i.e. bear little relation to a real court scenario); participants in research may be more likely to anticipate truthful information from experimenters, whereas eye witnesses in court cases may anticipate being subject to leading arguments as guilt/innocence is advocated (and thus identify/attempt to avoid being misled).
• A further realism pitfall - watching a video is arguably less emotionally arousing than witnessing real incidents, and some evidence suggests that emotional arousal can improve the accuracy of EWT.
• We cannot be certain whether or not misleading information actually influences the memory ‘trace’ itself; it could just be demand characteristics driving changes in recall (i.e. participants’ behaviour may be affected by how they perceive the purposes of the experiment).
• Attention is crucial for encoding information into long term memory, so eyewitnesses who did not attend properly to the crime scene are unlikely to produce accurate testimony.
• Much of the research into misinformation effects has been conducted using university students who are unlikely to be representative of the general population.
• The way we encode information affects our ability to retrieve it later – if we do not pay attention to details at the time, then these will not form part of our memory trace, making them difficult to remember later.
• Eyewitnesses often fail to notice important features of an event because their attention was focused elsewhere.
• Eyewitness testimony (EWT) is the ability of people to remember details of events, such as accidents and crimes, which they themselves have observed. Accuracy of EWT can be affected by factors such as misleading information and anxiety.
• Misleading information is incorrect information given to the eyewitness usually after the event (hence often called 'post-event information'). It can take many forms, such as leading questions or post-event discussion between co-witnesses and/or other people.
• A leading question is a question which, because of the way it's phrased, suggests a certain answer. For example, "Was the knife in his left hand?" leads the person to think that's where the knife was.
• Cognitive decline with age means that older witnesses may find it harder to process new information accurately, especially when under stressful conditions like witnessing a crime.
• Age is another factor affecting accuracy of EWT - older adults tend to perform worse than younger ones due to age related cognitive decline
• Post-event discussions with others about what happened may also lead witnesses to change their memories. This happens when one witness tells another something different from what actually occurred, but both believe it did happen.
• Post-event discussion (PED) occurs when there is more than one witness to an event. Witnesses may discuss what they have seen with co-witnesses or other people. This may influence the accuracy of each witness's recall of the details of the event.
• 𝙍𝙀𝙎𝙀𝘼𝙍𝘾𝙃 𝙄𝙉𝙏𝙊 𝙇𝙌:

  𝘗𝘙𝘖𝘊𝘌𝘋𝘜𝘙𝘌: Loftus and Palmer (1974) arranged for 45 students to watch film clips of car crashes and then take a test of immediate recall. In the critical (leading) question, they were asked to describe how fast the cars were going when they e.g. hit each other. The interchangeable verbs were "hit", "contacted", "bumped", "smashed" and "collided".

  
  

  𝘍𝘐𝘕𝘋𝘐𝘕𝘎𝘚: "Contacted" produced the lowest mean speed estimate of 31.8mph, whereas "smashed" produced the highest mean of 40.5mph. The leading question biased the eyewitness's recall of the event.
• False memories are created by presenting misleading information after an event has taken place. The misleading information can come from various sources including police interviews, media coverage, or conversations with friends and family.
• The response-bias explanation suggests that the wording of the question has no real effect on the participant's memories, but just influences how they decide to answer. When a participant gets a leading question using the word smashed, this encourages them to choose a higher speed estimate.
• Loftus and Palmer (1974) conducted a second experiment that supported the substitution explanation, which proposes that the wording of a leading question changes the participant's memory of the film clip. This was shown because participants who had originally heard the word smashed were more likely to later report seeing broken glass (there was none) than those who heard hit. The critical verb altered their memory of the incident.
• 𝙍𝙀𝙎𝙀𝘼𝙍𝘾𝙃 𝙊𝙉 𝙋𝙀𝘿:

  𝘗𝘙𝘖𝘊𝘌𝘋𝘜𝘙𝘌: Gabbert et al. (2003) studied participants in pairs. Each participant watched the same video of a crime but from a different POV, showing each different elements of the scene, e.g. a book in one POV. Both then discussed what they had seen and completed individual tests of recall.

  
  

  𝘍𝘐𝘕𝘋𝘐𝘕𝘎𝘚: 71% of the participants mistakenly recalled aspects of the event that they had not seen in the video but had picked up from the discussion. In a control group, with no discussion, this figure was 0%. This was evidence of memory conformity.
• Memory conformity refers to the phenomenon whereby witnesses change their recollection of events due to post-event discussions with others.
• One explanation of PED's effect on EWT is memory contamination. When co-witnesses to a crime discuss it with each other, their testimonies can be altered or distorted. This is because they combined (mis)information from other witnesses with their own memories.
• One explanation of PED's effect on EWT is memory conformity. Gabbert et al. concluded that witnesses often go along with each other, either to win social approval or because they believe that the other witnesses are right and they are wrong. Unlike with memory contamination, the actual memory is unchanged.
• 𝙀𝙑𝘼𝙇𝙐𝘼𝙏𝙄𝙊𝙉𝙎:

  1. real-world application (Loftus)
  2. counterpoint to real-world application (Foster et al.)
  3. evidence against substitution (Sutherland and Hayne)
  4. evidence challenging memory conformity (Skagerberg and Wright)
  5. demand characteristics (Zaragoza and McCloskey)
• 𝟭. 𝗥𝗘𝗔𝗟-𝗪𝗢𝗥𝗟𝗗 𝗔𝗣𝗣𝗟𝗜𝗖𝗔𝗧𝗜𝗢𝗡:

  One strength of research into misleading information is that it has important practical uses in the criminal justice system.

  Loftus (1975) believes that leading questions can have such a distorting effect on memory that police officers need to be careful about how they phrase their questions in interviews. Psychologists are sometimes asked to act as expert witnesses in court trials and explain the limits of EWT to juries.

  This shows that psychologists can help improve the way the legal system works.
• 𝟮. 𝗖𝗢𝗨𝗡𝗧𝗘𝗥𝗣𝗢𝗜𝗡𝗧 𝗧𝗢 𝗥-𝗪𝗔:

  The practical applications of EWT may be affected by issues with research.

  For instance, Loftus and Palmer's (1974) participants watched video clips in a lab (much less stressful than real life). Foster et al. (1994) point out that EWT has important consequences in real life, but not so much in a research study (participants less motivated to be accurate).

  This suggests that researchers such as Loftus are too pessimistic about the effects of misleading information - EWT may be more dependable than many studies suggest.
• 𝟯. 𝗘𝗩𝗜𝗗𝗘𝗡𝗖𝗘 𝗔𝗚𝗔𝗜𝗡𝗦𝗧 𝗦𝗨𝗕𝗦𝗧𝗜𝗧𝗨𝗧𝗜𝗢𝗡:

  One limitation of the substitution explanation is that EWT is more accurate for some aspects of an event than others.

  Sutherland and Hayne (2001) showed participants a video clip and when asked misleading questions, recall was more accurate for central details than peripheral ones. This focus of attention presumably means memories were more resistant to misleading information.

  This suggests that the original memories for central details survived and were not distorted, an outcome not predicted by the substitution explanation
• 𝟰. 𝗘𝗩𝗜𝗗𝗘𝗡𝗖𝗘 𝗔𝗚𝗔𝗜𝗡𝗦𝗧 𝗠𝗘𝗠𝗢𝗥𝗬 𝗖𝗢𝗡𝗙𝗢𝗥𝗠𝗜𝗧𝗬:

  One limitation of the memory conformity explanation is evidence that PED actually alters EWT.

  Skagerberg and Wright (2008) showed participants video clips of which there were two versions: the mugger's hair was light or dark brown. After PED in pairs, participants did not report what they had seen or heard but a blend of the two; the most common answer to hair colour was "medium brown".

  This suggests that memory itself is distorted through misleading PED, rather than the result of memory conformity.
• 𝟱. 𝗗𝗘𝗠𝗔𝗡𝗗 𝗖𝗛𝗔𝗥𝗔𝗖𝗧𝗘𝗥𝗜𝗦𝗧𝗜𝗖𝗦:

  Lab studies have identified misleading information as a cause of inaccurate EWT, partly by being able to control variables.

  However, Zaragoza and McCloskey (1989) argue that many answers given by participants in lab studies are due to demand characteristics. Such studies measure the participants’ ability to guess the hypothesis rather than the accuracy of their EWT.

  To maximise internal validity researchers need to control variables and reduce demand characteristics by avoiding cues participants can use to work out the hypothesis.
• Loftus and Palmer aimed to investigate the effects of leading questions on the accuracy of eyewitness testimony.