ewt: misleading info

• Why does post-event discussion affect EWT?

  Memory contamination is when their apps discuss what happened with each other and then the details blend together. But memory conformity is when the pps discuss with each other and then they believe what the other witnesses are saying but doubt what they actually saw to win social approval.
• limitation is demand characteristics. Most of the research for EWT takes place in a lab. Labs have been associated with misleading information making the EWT less accurate. Zaragoza and McClosky 1989 claim that answers given by pps in labs are due to demand characteristics as they want to give the researcher the answer that they want, to help them and not disappoint them. So when they do not know an answer to a question they guess.
• Research on post-event discussion

  Gabbert 2003 studied pps in pairs. Each person showed a video of a crime but at different angles. One was shown at an angle where you could not see the book title and the other you could. The pps had time to discuss what they had seen before they were asked to recall. The findings were that 71% of the pps had an inaccurate recall of the events that they had seen in the video as it was from their video they had not seen. But the control group  had 0% of inaccuracy when recalling. An explanation of this is memory conformity.
• Why do leading questions affect EWT?

  Response bias explanation which determined that the wording of the question has no effect on the memories but influences how they answer the question. Loftus and Palmer had another experiment in 1974 for the substitution explanation which determined that the wording can change the memories. The verb smashed altered the memory of the pps as they reported there was broken glass when there was none compared to the pps who had the verb hit which reported no memory of broken glass.
• limitation is that for substitution explanation, EWT is more accurate in some aspects than others. Sutherland and Hayne showed pps a video. Then asked a leading question. The accuracy for centre details is higher than peripheral details. It can be assumed that the pps attention to central details is resistant to leading questions. This means that original details of memory survived and not distorted, an outcome which is not predicted by substitution explanation.
• strength is that it has practical use in the criminal justice system. Loftus 1975 believed leading questions were abl;e to distort the memory of a EWT meaning that the police would need to be careful with the way that they had worded the questions such as a neutral verb which could describe the situation. Some psychologists were asked to act as an EW in court to tell the jury the limits of an EWT. This means that psychologists can help the criminal justice system by protecting innocent people from wrongful convictions.
•  on the other hand, a limitation is that it has issues with the research. Loftus and Palmer's research was watched in a lab, reducing the stress of the situation due to the artificial environment. But Rachael Forster in 1994 claimed that EW have important consequences within the real world but not within research.  That suggests that Loftus and Palmer are too pessimistic about misleading information, and EWT may be more dependable than many studies suggest.
• smashed or bumped to get the pps to suggest what speed the vehicle was travelling at. Loftus and Palmer 1974 had 45 pps and asked them to watch clips of a car accident. Then after they watched the clips they were as a leading question with misleading information. They were asked to describe how fast the car was going. 5 groups of pps  and each given different verbs to describe how the accident happened: hit, bumped, collided, contacted, and smashed. The findings of this were that the verb contacted had an average speed of 31.8 but the average speed of smashed was 40.5.