misleading info

• A strength with research into misleading information and post event discussion is that it has important practical uses in the real world, where the consequences of inaccurate EWT can be very serious.

  Loftus (1975) believes that leading questions can have a distorting effect on memory and so police officers need to be very careful about how they phrase their questions when interviewing eyewitnesses.

  This research can have a huge positive impact on several lives by improving the way the legal system works.
• Zaragosa & McCloskey (1989) argue that many answers that participants give in lab studies of EWT are the result of demand characteristics. This is because they don't want to let the researcher down and want to appear helpful and attentive.

  This means that instead of answering truthfully, participants are trying to work out what is expected of them, by using cues in the procedure.

  There is a danger that participants won't behave naturally which decreases the validity of the study as they are no longer measuring the accuracy of EWT.
• A limitation of the study is that the participants watched film clips of car accidents and this is a very different experience from witnessing a real accident since these clips mainly lack the stress of a real accident.

  This is a problem as there is evidence which suggests that emotions can have an influence on memory.

  This is a weakness because studies like this which use artificial tasks may not suggest much about how leading questions affect EWT in cases of real accidents or crimes.
• Furthermore, it could be that researchers such as Loftus are too pessimistic about the accuracy of EWT - it may be more reliable than many studies suggest.

  This decreases the external validity of the study as leading questions and post event discussions may not have as much of an effect on EWT in real life.

  However, we should not abandon the study's conclusions as it has helped the police to structure their interviews with witnesses more efficiently.
• Foster et al (1994) stated that the details eyewitnesses remember during an event can have very serious consequences in the real world, but the same is not true in research studies.

  During the study, participants are aware that the answers they give will not have any significant effects. However, in a real life situation, the reliability of EWT could make the difference between life and death.

  It could be argued that leading questions have less effect on the accuracy of EWT when the consequences are more serious, since participants know that their responses really do matter.
• Laboratory studies of eye witness testimony may underestimate its accuracy.