factors affecting the accuracy of eyewitness testimony

• eyewitness testimony(EWT)

  the ability of people to remember the 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 - leading questions and post event discussion

  incorrect information given to a witness usually after the event leading questions is a question which because of the way it is phrased suggests a certain answer

  post event discussion occurs when there is more than one witness to an event which may influence the accuracy of a witnesses recall
• research on leading questions

  Loftus and Palmer(1974) wanted to see if changing a certain word in a question would lead to a different answer

  45 participants watched clips of a car crash and were asked to describe how fast the car was going when they hit each other, different groups were given different verbs to replace 'hit' such as 'contacted' and 'smashed'

  contacted had an estimated speed of 31.8mph where as smashed had an estimated speed of 40.5mph meaning the leading questions biased the eyewitnesses recall of event, it has no real effect of the persons memory but just influences them
• research on post-event discussion

  Gabbert(2003) wanted to see if talking to other eyewitnesses changed their recall of events

  studies participants in pairs, they watched a video of the same crime from different points of view the other could not see, they discussed what they had seen before individually completing the test of recall

  71% of participants recalled information they didn't see showing that discussing events does effect your recall of events
• misleading information evaluation strengths

  it has important practical uses in the criminal justice system by the phrasing of the question it can protect innocent people from faulty convictions based on unreliable EWT
• misleading information evaluation limitation

  EWT is more accurate for some aspects of an event than for others, presumably the participants attention was focused on central features of an event and these memories were relatively resistant to misleading information, this suggests that original memories for central details survived and were not distorted
• anxiety

  a state of emotional and physical arousal, emotions include having worried thoughts and feelings of tension, physical changed can include inrease of heart rate and sweatiness
• anxiety having a negative influence on recall

  Johnson and Scott(1976) wanted to look at the effects of the presence of a weapon which creates anxiety, they created two groups:

  low anxiety - participants in a waiting room overheard a casual conversation then saw a man carrying a pen covered in grease

  high anxiety - participants overheard a heated conversation with sounds of breaking glass and saw a man carrying a knife with blood on

  49% participants could pick out the photo of the man carrying the pen but only 33% could pick out a photo of the man carrying the knife - weapon focus
• anxiety having a positive influence on recall

  Yuille and Cutshall(1986) wanted to see if anxiety increased recall, they conducted a study of an actual shooting in a gun shop in Canada where the owner shot a thief dead, there was 21 witnesses who were interviewed 5 months after and asked how stressed they were at the time of the incident

  there was 11% higher accuracy of recall for those who ranked their anxiety as high at the time of the shooting, this supports the idea that heightened anxiety draws our attention to external cues through 'flight or fight' response
• anxiety evaluation strengths

  supporting view that anxiety has a negative effect on the accuracy of recall, in the study of Valentine and Mesout(2009) - entering a horror setting in London dungeon when describing one of the actors in the dungeon they had many wrong details showing that anxiety is clearly disrupting the participants ability to recall meaning it does have a negative effect
• anxiety evaluation limitations

  the study by Johnson and Scott may not have been testing anxiety as weapon focus is rather due to the unusualness of the situation and not anxiety or threat