Outline And Evaluate Eyewitness Testimony

This study is a replication of a study by Loftus and Palmer in 1974. The aim of the study is to test the effect of leading questions in eyewitness testimonies and how reliable the account of the witness is. The experiment uses two groups which receive two different verbs, ‘smashed’ and ‘contacted’. The method consists of an independent measure design. The independent variables are the way the words are phrased in the questions, while the dependent variable is the estimation made by the participants of the speed of the car. Random sampling is used to select the 20 high school students from ACS Cobham International School. The results consist of the mean and standard deviations of the responses participants gave. The verb ‘contacted’ had a higher mean and
Psychologists, Loftus and Palmer studied the memory and its reliability in great detail. The aim of the study is to investigate whether or not an eye witnesses testimony can be changed by asking leading questions. Previous studies have concluded that memories are not accurate representations of events because they are formed on past experiences, cultural schemas and mental representations of culture. Bartlett (1932) investigated how memory of a story is affected by prior knowledge. He wanted to see if cultural background and inexperience with a text would lead to a distortion of the memory when recalled. His results showed that when participants were asked to recall the story, the story became shorter and details were left out that were culturally important to the story.

Eyewitness testimony refers to an account given by someone witnessing an event. Often being affected by psychological factors like: anxiety, stress, reconstructive memory, weapon focus and leading questions. Lotus and Palmer (1974) believe that a memory is not like a video, instead memories of events are reconstructed when we try to retrieve the