Misleading information

• The study’s general aim was to investigate the accuracy of memory after witnessing a car accident. In particular it was to see if leading questions distort the accuracy of an eyewitness’s immediate recall
• People are notoriously poor at estimating speed of moving cars and therefore they might be particularly receptive to any hints
• The procedures involved 45 students being shown 7 films of different traffic accident and they were given a questionnaire which asked them to describe the accident and then answer a series of questions about it
• There was one critical question: “about how fast were the cars going when they hit each other“. One group of ps was given this question and the other four groups were given the verbs “smashed”, “collided”, “bumped”, or “contacted” instead of the word “hit”
• The mean speed estimate was calculated for each group. The group given the word “smashed” estimated a higher speed than the other groups (about 41mph) and the group given “contacted” estimated the lowest speed (about 32mph)
• Loftus and Palmer concluded that the form of question can have a significant effect on a witness‘ answer
• Leading questions can affect the accuracy of memory. Such leading questions are an example of what psychologists call post-event information- information given after the event which may alter memory
• It’s possible that such post-event information causes the information to be altered before it’s stored so that memory is permanently affected
• A second possible explanation is that the form of the question actually alters the participants memory representation of the accident, which leads them to produce a higher or lower estimate
• Bekerian and Bowers (1983) replicated a study by Loftus et al (1978) and found that ps aren’t susceptible to misleading information if questions are presented in the same order as the original data. This suggests that the order of questions had a significant effect and therefore memory change was due to response bias not storage. This provides an alternative explanation to Loftus and Palmer and highlights the importance of question order in police interviews
• Lab experiments like those carried out by Loftus may not represent real life because people don’t take the experiment seriously and/or they aren’t emotionally aroused in the way they would be in real accident. Foster et al (1994) found that if ps thought they were watching a real life robbery and also thought that their responses would influence the trial, their identification of a robber was more accurate. This suggests that misleading information may have less influence on real life EWT than Loftus’ research suggests
• Loftus conducted a memorable study involving a cut-out of bugs bunny. College students who had visited Disneyland as children were asked to evaluate advertising material about Disneyland containing misleading information about bugs bunny or ariel. Ps assigned to the bugs or ariel groups were more likely to report having shaken hands with these characters than the control group. This shows how powerful misleading information can be in creating an inaccurate