EYE WITNESS TESTIMONY

ACCURACY AND MISLEADING INFORMATION

Eye witness testimony is the evidence provided by witnesses to a crime or event. It relies on the witnesss memory to give across the information. Eye witnesses are required to give information on the description of people they saw or the location and setting. Witnesses are often inaccurate as their recollection is bad. Cognitive psychologists try and find the best possible way to get the most accurate information out of the eye witnesses. Loftus and Palmer investigated the accuracy of memory after an event. Using 45 students, they showed the participants films of car accidents. After watching the films, they asked questions such as how fast do you think the cars were going when they hit? The word hit was replaced with smashed, collided, bumped, and contacted. Participants who were given the word smashed reported an average speed of 41mph, whereas participants who had contacted reported average speed of 32mph. A week after the experiment, the participants were split into 3 groups, one was given smashed, one hit and one was given no indication. The participants were then asked did you see any broken glass? Although there was no broken glass, they were more likely to say yes if they were in the smashed condition that the others. This shows that leading questions can affect the accuracy of peoples memories of an event. Leading questions are post-event information. This affects police interviews. However this was an artificial experiment meaning watching a video is a lot let emotionally arousing as real life event. Also, because of the leading questions, participants may have used the Greenspoon effect to give the response they thought was correct. This would have reduced the validity and reliability. Supporting evidence Loftus and Zanni Showed participants a film of a car accident and then asked them two questions in two different conditions. Did you see the broken headlight or Did you see a broken headlight even though there wasnt a headlight. 7% of participants in the first condition claimed to see a broken headlight, and 17% claimed to see one in the second condition. This shows that just changing between the words a and the is enough to effect the accuracy of the eye witnesses.

AGE Age affects accuracy in eye witness testimonies. Children and EWT Koriat et al/Ceci and Bruck Koriat believed that children are unreliable when it comes to EWT as they have an undeveloped schema. Leichtman and Ceci Children are especially susceptible to misleading questions. Poole and Lindsey Children 3-8 were asked to watch a science demo and then read a story. The story involved some information about the science demo they witnessed, but some new information. The children were then asked questions about the science demo. It was found that the children added information from the story. When asked where the information was from, the older children managed to recognise it was from the story, yet the younger children were less able to distinguish the source. The children were quite young, so it could be argued that they didnt understand the experiment. The experiment was also low controlled so extraneous variables were hard to control and couldve damaged the experiment making it unreliable. Davies Davies disagreed that children are unreliable when giving EWT as he said that some differences between adults and children are overstated but the interviewer must increase accuracy by taking into account interviewer bias, repeated questions and influence of authority. Parker and Carranza They compared the ability of primary school children and college students to correctly identify an individual following a slide show of a mock crime. They found that children had a higher rate of choosing somebody than adult witnesses. This means they are more likely to make mistakes than college students.

Elderly and ETW Yarmey Yarmey suggested that elderly witnesses are prone to fail in recall. Participants were shown a staged event of a violent scene. The elderly were then questioned and it was found that 80% didnt mention the knife compared to the 20% of adults who didnt. This shows that elderly people are not

reliable when giving EWT. This study has high ecological validity as it could happen in real life. However it was artificial as it was staged Cohen and Faulkner They showed participants a video of a kidnapping. After the elderly watched the video they were given a narrative scene with misleading information. In the recall test the elderly were found to be more susceptible to the misleading information. This was a lab experiment which means it lacked ecological validity. Difference in age Yarmey 651 adults were stopped randomly in public and asked to recall physical characteristics of a woman they had briefly spoken to, 2 minutes previously. He found that adults and middle aged adults were more confident in recall than older adults. There was no accuracy difference, just a change in confidence. Mamon et al Mamon et al studied 16-33 year olds and 60-82 year olds as eyewitnesses. They found when there was a short delay between incident and recall there was no difference in the accuracy. When the incident was delayed by one weed, the older witnesses were significantly less accurate. Own age bias Many studies have shown that older individuals are poorer at face recognition and eye witness memory. People are better at processing peoples faces of their own age. This is a problem as ownage bias has not been acknowledged in eye witness research. Anastasi and Rhodes 3 different age groups were used. Each age group was shown 24 photos representing the 3 different age groups. They were presented with 48 photographs (24 seen. 24 distractors). They found that young and middle aged were significantly more accurate than older participants. All the participants were more able to recognise own age group photographs more accurately than to other age group photos. The findings of own-age bias are the same as own-race bias, where people are more likely to recognise people from their same race. Bringham and Malpass More contact we have with the similar age or ethnic group the better memory we have for those individuals.

ANXIETY Psychologists tend to believe that small increases in anxiety and arousal may increase the accuracy of memory, but high levels have a negative effect on accuracy. In violent crimes, anxiety is likely to be high. The witness is more likely to focus on the central details, such as a weapon, rather than the other details, such as the criminal, surroundings, etc. Christianson and Hubinette They interviewed 110 witnesses of bank robberies; the witnesses that were directly threatened remembered more about the robbers than those who were just onlookers. Yerks-Dodson Yerks-Dodson said that anxiety effects on eye witness testimony are curvelinear which means a small to medium increase on arousal increases the accuracy of memory, but high levels of arousal interfere with accuracy. Deffenbacher et al. Deffenbacher et al carried out a meta-analysis looking at the effects of heightened anxiety on eye witness recall. They found that there was lots of support for the hypothesis that high levels of stress negatively affect eye witness testimony. Yuille and Cutshall A real life robbery happened. They found that the most anxious witnesses were the most accurate even 5 months later. Loftus Loftus studied weapon focus in EWT. Using an independent groups design, participants heard a discussion in a nearby room. In condition 1, a man came out of the room with pen and grease on his hands. In the second condition the man came out carrying a knife covered in blood. Participants were asked to identify the man from 50 photographs. In condition 1, 49% were accurate, whereas in condition 2, only 33% of the participants correctly identified the right man. This concludes that when anxious and aroused, witnesses focus on a weapon more than other details. The study has high ecological validity as the participants werent aware that the experiment was staged. This means there were lots of ethical issues as the participants could have been very stressed at the sight of a man with a bloody knife. Steblay A meta-analysis was done looking at studies focusing on weapon focus. They found that the presence of a weapon can reduce the chances of the witness correctly identifying the person holding it.

Loftus Participants were shown a violent version of a crime where a boy was shot in the face. Recall was impaired in the events leading up to the gunshot. This shows anxiety impairs recollection, and therefore affects eye witness testimony. This study lacks ecological validity as it was artificial. The video the participants were showed was extremely violent meaning the protection of participants ethical guidelines was broken. This video caused a lot of stress for some people. On the plus side, as it was a lab experiment, it can be easily replicated and therefore is a reliable experiment. Riniola et al Real world applications They spoke to survivors of the titanic in 1912. Until the wreck was found, many people believed it sunk in one piece. Witnesses reported it sunk in 2 parts. Riniola discovered that 75% of these eye witnesses were correct. This concluded that even in extreme traumatic events in poor light can result in accurate recollections.