The issues of eye witness testimony

Eye witness testimony is very important when it comes to identifying an individual from a crime scene. However, there are factors which can cause eye witness testimony to become false.

Leading questions have a huge effect on eye witness testimony and when used incorrectly can cause false memories. For example, Loftus and Zanni (1975) conducted an experiment on the wording of a question put to a person about a recently-witnessed event. After watching a short movie of a multi-car accident, 100 students were given a questionnaire which contained six critical questions. Three questions asked about items which had appeared in the film and three asked about items not present in the film.  Half the subjects were given questions such as “Did you see a broken headlight?” whereas the other half were given questions such as “Did you see the broken headlight?” It was found that those who were asked “the” question were more likely to report having seen it whether or not it had really appeared in the film, than those who were asked “a” questions. This highlights the importance of wording questions in a way that won’t cause false information to be collected.

The age of the eye witness is also an important issue to consider. Poole and Lindsay (2001) studied whether age affects the accuracy of eye witness testimony. Children aged three to eight were engaged in a science demonstration then listened to a story from their parents which described experienced and non-experienced events. When asked about the experiment, the children incorporated the story from their parents into the original memory. At this stage of the study there was no difference in suggestibility between ages. However, when asked to think carefully about where they had got their information from (I.e. source monitoring) some of the older children retracted many of their false reports whereas the younger children did not. Therefore when receiving eye witness testimony from a child, it is very important that the possibility of exposure to misinformation prior to questioning is taken into account and more specific interviewing may be necessary.

There are many more issues with eye witness testimony which all have to be taken into account during an investigation otherwise very misleading information will be classed as true which could cause an innocent person to be put into prison. The factors such as leading questions should be controlled when conducting an interview and the age of the witness needs to be noted and errors in their memories expected.

 

References:

Loftus, E. F. (1975). Leading questions and the eyewitness report. Cognitive Psychology, 7, 550-572. Doi:10.1016/0010-0285(75)90023-7

Poole, D. A., & Lindsay, D. S. (2001). Children’s eyewitness reports after exposure to misinformation from parents. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 7(1), 27-50. Doi:10.1037/1076-898X.7.1.27

Questionnaires Vs. Interviews

Questionnaires and Interviews are both important in Psychology for collecting information and opinions from participants for a study, but which is better?

A questionnaire is used to collect information from a large sample of people about their views, attitudes and behaviours. It can be used to gather data on a wide variety of topics and once constructed they are easy to administer, large amounts of data can be gathered quickly and relatively cheaply and both quantitative and qualitative data can be produced from them. However, you cannot be sure that respondents will answer questions truthfully as they may not want people knowing about a certain situation (e.g. a drinking problem). Respondents may also interpret questions differently therefore giving unreliable information or they may answer questions in a way that they think the researcher wants (demand characteristics) and usually very few of the people given the questionnaires actually fill them in and return them.

Interviews involve direct verbal questioning of participants by the researcher. This technique can obtain private aspects of behaviour and collect detailed qualitative data about sensitive issues. They are relatively easy to replicate if structured interviews are used (e.g. all interviewees are asked the same questions.) However, if unstructured interviews are used (exploring a general topic in depth which can uncover additional information that you didn’t plan on obtaining) makes interviews very difficult to replicate. During interviews, the researcher can expand and clarify the question if the participant doesn’t understand, but on the other hand the researcher may cause problems e.g. investigator effects where the participants may find the investigator attractive and therefore make themselves sound better which causes false information to be gathered. The interviewer himself may have a bias towards some people and may interpret the behaviours of some participants as meaning one thing when it means something else.

Overall, it seems that questionnaires are better because they collect more reliable and true information for research as they have fewer variables which can alter the information or cause false data to be collected.

How do situational factors affect obedience?

We all know the study by Milgram on obedience, but what factors caused his participants to obey? Well, Milgram ran further studies into obedience and this is what he found. In his initial experiment, Milgram found that around 65% of the participants continued up to 450v. However, when he moved the experiment to down town offices instead of in a lab, this percentage dropped to 47%. Here we can clearly see that the setting has a crucial impact on obedience and that people are much more obedient in an area which appears more professional.

The presence of the experimenter is also very important with obedience as when Milgram had the experimenter in a separate room giving instructions to the ‘teacher’ by telephone, the percentage of participants continuing past 450v dropped to 20%. This can be explained by the fact that there seems to be no legitimate authority as it could be anyone on the phone so therefore the participants don’t feel obliged to continue onto 450v. Finally, one of the most shocking results in this experiment is when the teacher was paired with an assistant who throws the switch for them. In this situation the percentage of participants who continued up to 450v soared up to 92%.

These results show that it is extremely important to consider situational factors while designing a study as it can seriously affect the results. We have seen examples like this in everyday life for example, in schools pupils obey teachers (most of the time) but if the pupil sees a teacher out of school, they will be unlikely to obey them.