Strength

• Eyewitness testimony (EWT)


  Witnesses often go along with each other, either to win social approval or because they believe the other witnesses are right and they are wrong
• Unlike with memory contamination, the actual memory is unchanged
• Research into misleading information

  • It has important practical uses in the criminal justice system
• Leading questions by police officers

  Can have a distorting effect on memory of eyewitnesses
• 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 to improve the way the legal system works, especially by protecting innocent people from faulty convictions based on unreliable EWT