Misleading Questions:

• STRENGTH:

  • Has important practical uses in the criminal justice system
  • Consequences of inaccurate EWT can be very serious
  • Loftus 1975 believes that leading questions can have such a distorting effect on memory that police need to be careful about how they phrase their questions when interviewing eyewitnesses
  • Psychologists are sometimes asked to act as expert witnesses in court trials and explain the limits of EWT to juries

  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
• LIMITATION:

  • The practical applications of EWT may be affected by issues with research
  • IE: Loftus and Palmer's participants watched film clips in a lab a very different experience from witnessing a real event ie less stressful
  • Also, Foster et al 1994 point out that what eyewitnesses remember has important consequences in the real world but pp responses in research do not matter in the same way so research so pp are less motivated to be accurate

  Suggests that researchers are too pessimistic about the effects of misleading information EWT may be more dependable than many studies suggest
• LIMITATION:

  • EWT is more accurate for some aspects of an event than for others
  • IE: Sutherland and Hayne 2001 showed pp's a video clip
  • When pps were later asked misleading questions their recall was more accurate for central details of the event than for peripheral ones
  • Presumably the participants' attention was focused on central features of the event and these memories were relatively resistant to misleading information

  This suggests that the original memories for central details survived and were not distorted, an outcome that is not predicted by the substitution explanation.