Evaluation of Misleading Information

• strengths

  real-life application
• real-life application

  a great strength if all research into misleading information is that it has hugely important practical uses in the real world

  the effect of misleading information on eyewitness testimonies has huge implications on the criminal justice system which relies heavily on eyewitness identification for investigating and prosecuting crime

  Loftus' research reveals that leading questions can have such a distorting effect on memory that police officers need to be careful about how they phrase their questions when interviewing eyewitnesses

  this demonstrates the important role of eyewitness testimony research in helping to ensure that innocent people are not convicted of crimes they did not commit on the basis of faulty eyewitness testimony
• limitations

  • the tasks are artificial (Yuille and Cutshall)
  • individual differences
  • demand characteristics
• the tasks are artificial

  a lot of the research into misleading information lack ecological validity as they were carried out in labs and so do not represent real life. this may lead to participants taking them seriously and/or they are not emotionally aroused in the way that they would be in a real accident

  e.g. Yuille and Cutshall (1986)- witnesses to an armed robbery in Canada gave very accurate reports of the crime for four months after the event despite initially being given two misleading questions

  this suggests that misleading information may have less influence on real life EWT than Loftus' research suggests
• individual differences

  there is evidence that older people are less accurate than younger people when giving eyewitness reports

  many studies have found that, compared to younger subjects, elderly people have difficulty remembering the source of their information, even though their memory for the information itself is unimpaired. as a result, they become more prone to the effect of misleading information when giving testimony

  this suggests that individual differences, age in particular, are an important factor when assessing the reliability of EWT
• demand characteristics

  it has been argues that many answers given in lab studies of EWT are the result of demand characteristics. participants usually do not want to let the researcher down, and want to appear helpful and attentive. so when they are asked a question they don't know the answer to, they guess, especially if it's a yes/no question