Outline and Evaluate Factors Influencing Eye Witness Testimony Essay

The term ‘eye witness testimony’ refers to an area of research into the accuracy of memory concerning significant events, it is legally considered to be a reliable account of events. However, research into eye witness testimony has found that it can be affected by many psychological factors such as, anxiety and stress, reconstructive memory, selective attention and leading questions. Anxiety and stress can be associated with many factors such as, violence and crime. Clifford and Scott (1978) found that participants who saw a film of a violent event remembered less of the information than a control group who saw a less stressful version. However, Yuile and Cutshall (1986) found that witnesses of a real event had accurate memories of what happened. The police interviewed witnesses and thirteen of them were interviewed five months later. Recall was found to be accurate, even after a long period of time. One weakness of this study was that the witnesses who experienced the highest levels of stress where actually present at the event, instead of watching second hand from a film, and this may have helped with the accuracy of their memory recall. Selective attention is when the witness is able to describe one detail, giving them less time to pay attention to other details. It can also be because the witness is more likely to focus on a detail with more emotional significance, such as a weapon. Loftus et al. (1987) showed participants a series of slides of a customer at a restaurant. In on version the customer was holding a gun, in the other the customer held a chequebook. Participants who had been shown the version with the gun present tended to focus on the gun itself and not much else. As a result they were less likely to identify the customer as appose to those who had seen the chequebook version. Bartlett (1932) showed that memory is not just a factual recording of what has occurred, but that we make â€Å"effort after meaning†. By this, Bartlett meant that we try to fit what we remember with what we really know and understand. As a result, we quite often change our memories so they become more sensible to us. He had participants play ‘Chinese Whispers’ and when asked to recall the detail of the story, each person seemed to tell it in their own individual way. With repeating telling, the passages became shorter, puzzling ideas were rationalised or forgotten altogether and details changed to become more familiar or conventional. For this research Bartlett concluded, â€Å"memory is not exact and is distorted by existing preconceptions. It seems, therefore, that each of us ‘reconstructs’ our memories to conform to our personal beliefs about the world. † This clearly indicates that our memories are anything but reliable records of events. They are individual recollections, which have been shaped and constructed according to our stereotypes, beliefs, expectations etc. Loftus and Palmer (1974) tested their hypothesis that the language used in eye witness testimony can alter and change memory. They aimed to show that leading questions could distort eye witness testimony accounts, as the account would become distorted by reminders provided in the question. To test this, they asked people to estimate the speed of motor vehicles using different forms of questions. Participants were shown slides of a car accident involving a number of cars and asked to describe what had happened as if they were eye witnesses. They were then asked specific questions, including the question â€Å"About how fast were the cars going when they (hit/smashed/collided/ bumped/contacted) each other? The estimated speed was affected by the verb used. The verb implied information about the speed, which affected the participants’ memory of the accident. Participants who were asked the â€Å"smashed† question thought the cars were going faster than those who were asked the â€Å"hit† question. When people were asked a week after viewing the film whether they saw any broken glass at the scene (there was none), people in the smashed group were more likely to say yes. Therefore, a leading question that encouraged them to remember the vehicles going faster also encouraged them to remember that they saw non-existent broken glass. This suggests that memory is easily distorted by questioning technique and information acquired after the event can merge with original memory causing inaccurate memory. The addition of false details to a memory of an event is referred to as confabulation. This has important implications for the questions used in police interviews of eye witnesses. In conclusion, eye witness testimony can be influenced by a number of factors, including, anxiety and stress, selective attention, reconstructive memory and leading questions. They all have a large effect on eye witness testimony and affected the results in many different ways.