Misleading Information

• eyewitness testimony

  the evidence provided in court by a person who witnessed a crime
• misleading information

  your memory of an event can be corrupted by later information
• two types of misleading information

  1. leading questions- the way a question is worded can influence your recall
  2. post event discussion- when witnesses discuss an event and their memory can get contaminated by things that other people say
• famous psychologist that studied the phenomenon of misleading information

  Elizabeth Loftus
• study that investigated the effect of leading questions on memory

  Loftus and Palmer (1974)
• study that investigated the effect of post event discussion on memory

  Gabbert et al. (2003)
• evidence for leading questions: Loftus and Palmer (1974)

  • 45 students were asked to watch a video of two cars crashing
  • then they were asked a question and the verb used in the question was changed for each group 'How fast were the cars going when they .... eachother?'
  • the verbs were 'contacted, bumped, collided, hit, smashed'
  • they found that the more charge you put behind a verb the higher the speed estimate
• Loftus and Palmer (1974) EXPERIMENT 2

  • they carried out another experiment whereby they got participants to watch the video of the car crash and asked the question
  • a week later they were asked whether they saw any broken glass, even though there was no broken glass in the video
  • they found that the participants who were given the more charged verbs were more likely to report seeing broken glass. their memory of the original event had been distorted due to one word in a sentence
• evidence for post event discussion: Gabbert et al. (2003)

  • participants were studied in pain
  • each watched a video of a crime, but it was filmed from different points of view, so that each participant could see elements in the event that the other could not
  • the pairs then discussed what they had seen before individually completing a test of recall
  • they found that 71% of the participants had mistakenly recalled aspects of the event they did not see in the video, but had picked up in the discussion
  • in a control group, where there was no discussion, the figure was 0%