Cards (2)

  • Procedure
    45 students watched clips of car crashes and were asked questions about them. In the critical question (a leading question) participants were asked to describe how fast the cars were travelling when they collided. There were 5 groups of participants and all were given a different verb ('hit', 'smashed', 'collided', etc).
  • Findings
    The mean estimated speed was calculated for each group. The verb 'contacted' resulted in a mean estimate of 31.8 mph. For the verb 'smashed', the mean was 40.5 mph. The leading question biased the eyewitness's recall of the event.