Reliability of EWT

• Reliable: face recognition

  • more reliable describing people of same race
  • Faces not seen in isolation but influenced by event and schemas,social norms and values (cross race identification bias)
• Reliable: cognitive interviewbetter recall if context reinstated- crime scene reconstruction or cognitive interview

  • better recall if context reinstated- crime scene reconstruction or cognitive interview

  1. mentally reinstate context
  2. report everything regardless of importance
  3. recount events in different order
  4. recount events from different perspectives

  • ground breaking w Stephanie Slater whose kidnapper was caught based off her testimony
• Reliable: emotion and flashbulb memory.

  • anxiety or stress associates w rl crime
  • Stress performance relationship between recall and reliability follows inverted u curve
  • Performance increases with stress up to optimal point
  • So staged crimes show poor reliability of recall (low stress)
  • witnesses of real robbery not influenced in their accounts when leading questions are used
• unreliable: age and personality

  • children lack vocab and schemas to understand what they witnessed and to articulate it
  • Elderly MAY be more likely to be misled however research shows 8 and 17 year old effected by misleading info but 70 year olds not
  • impact of intelligence of child EW positive - higher intelligence= reliable recall but shyness negatively related- shy children less accurate
• unreliable: reconstructive memory

  • Bartlett shows we continually try to make sense of what’s around us, memories assimilated into existing schemas- effort after meaning
  • Witnesses try to fit no into existing schema, results in distortion
  • witnesses assume suspect is present in identity parade, leading to false accusations
• unreliable: leading qs

  -Loftus and Palmer: post event info can systematically alter pps response to q and memory of event
• unreliable: repression and weapon focus

  • Repression is unconscious forgetting of traumatic events, thoughts and feelings as they’re too anxiety provoking to remember
  • Makes reliability questionable
  • young women treated for sexual abuse as children 38% had no conscious recall of abuse 17 yrs later
  • emotional response to threat means may be unable to take in whole scene.
  • Less able to report facial features of perpetrator if weapon present- reliability of EWT reduced by emotional response to weapon
• Ethical implications of EWT debate

  • If unreliable= miscarriages of justice. EG post event info given to Jennifer Thompson about rapist meant Ronald Cotton incorrectly identified and sentenced to life plus 50yrs in prison, DNA meant real rapist was identified.
  • Controversy about death penalty- 68% of death sentences impose 1973-1995 overturned
  • Safeguards now in place to protect child EW
• Economic implication of EWT debate

  • Cost of retrial and compensation - Ronald Cotton given $105.000 compensation.
  • Crown court trials £80000 a day.
• Social implications of EWT debate

  • If people unreliable, increase CCTV but creates big brother society
  • Infringes n freedom
  • but only way to truly know