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
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