LOFTUS AND PALMER'S STUDY OF THE EFFECTS OF LANGUAGE ON RECALL IN EYEWITNESS TESTIMONY
Aims: To test their hypothesis that the language used in eyewitness testimony can alter memory. So they aimed to show that leading questions could distort accounts of events, therefore making them unreliable.
Procedures: 45
American students formed an opportunity sample. This was a laboratory
experiment with five conditions (shown in the third paragraoh), only one
of which was experienced by each participant.
Participants were shown slides of a car accident involving a number of cars and were then asked to describe what had happened as if they were eyewitnesses.
They were then asked specific questions, including the question "About how fast were the cars going when they (hit/smashed/collided/bumped/contacted - the five conditions) each other?"
The INDEPENDANT VARIABLE was the wording of the question.
The DEPENDANT VARIABLE was the speed reported by the participants.
A week after the participants saw the slide they were asked "Did you see the broken glass?" There was no broken glass shown in the slides.
Findings: The estimated
speed was affected by the word used (hit/smashed/collided/bumped/contacted).
The verb implied information about the speed, which systematically affected
the participants' memory of the accident.
Those who were asked the SMASHED question thought that the cars were going FASTER than those who were asked the HIT question.The mean estimate when SMASHED was used was 41MPH compared to 34MPH when HIT was used.
The speeds reported in descending order (highest to lowest) was SMASHED, COLLIDED, BUMPED, HIT then CONTACTED.
In answering the follow-up question 32% of participants who heard SMASHED reported broken glass, compared to 14% of the participants who heard HIT.
Conclusion: The questions asked can be termed 'leading' questions because they affected the participants' memory of the event. The question contained information about what the answer should be. Therefore, this language can have a distorting effect on eyewitness testimony, which can lead to inaccurate accounts. It is possible that the original memory has been reconstructed, but it is impossible to conclude that the original memory may have been replaced or experienced interferance.
Evaluation: The
research lacks MUNDANE REALISM. As the video clip will
not induce the same emotional reaction as witnessing a real crash would,
the way people will recall the incident will be different. So the findings
do not represent a real-life eyewitness tesimony, therefore lacking ECOLOGICAL
VALIDITY.
This experiment was based in a laboratory, making it ARTIFICAL. It also may have given the participants clues as to what the research hypothesis was, so that they may have acted in a way that they thought would please the experimenter. This means that it may have lacked INTERNAL VALIDITY.
However, the information that participants were asked to recall was quite meaningful and would be likely to occur in real-life, therefore the results are quite representative of everyday memory demands. So the findings could be GENERALISED to real life.
A positive point is that this research has had GREAT INFLUENCE on how witnesses to a crime are now interviewed, so it has been shown to have positive real-life applications.
Other Points: Estimating the speed
of a car is generally something that people are poor at doing, suggesting
that they may have been MORE OPEN TO SUGGESTION. We have
to question whether the results would have been different if the task
was not quite as difficult.
