Leading Questions And The Eyewitness Report By Elizabeth F. Loftus

The article I chose was “Leading Questions and the Eyewitness Report,” by Elizabeth F. Loftus. This article was a report of the results of four experiments conducted to study the importance of how questions are asked. More specifically, how the wording and timing of the question can influence the subject’s answer to that question. The subjects were exposed to events such as disruptions in a classroom or car accidents - things that are sudden and quick. In all four experiments, the subjects were all from the University of Washington, and in all four experiments, the subjects were tested in groups of varying sizes. In the first experiment, the subjects were exposed to a film of a car accident, and then questioned (in two different ways) about the speed of the car.
They were then asked a specific question about the clip, and then a week later, they were asked twenty more questions about the same clip (without having re-watched the video). Similar to the first experiment, in the third experiment, subjects watched a video of a car accident and then questioned about the speed of the car involved. This time however, unlike experiment one, the subjects were brought back a week later and were asked another ten questions about the video they had watched the week before. In the fourth experiment, the subjects watched a video of a collision between a car and a baby carriage, and asked a variety of different questions immediately after. The same subjects were then asked more questions a week later without reviewing the film. In all four experiments, the results suggested that asking a question directly following the event can skew the answer due new and sometimes false information altering or reconstructing how the event is