Effects of misleading question on eyewitness testimony.
Aim: this was to find out if misleading questions distorts the accuracy of EWT.
Method: loftus and palmer carried out a lab experiment which involved 45 students. They were shown 7 clips of a traffic accident. Afterwards the participants were given a questionnaire to answer series of questions. Although a critical question was asked, which was “how fast was the car going before hitting the other car”. Here the P’s were being split, one group were given this question while the others 5 groups were given verbs such as: smashed, collided, bumped and contacted instead of hit.
Result: smashed (40.8), collided (39.3), bumped (38.1), contacted (31.8), hit (34)
Findings: loftus and palmer found that the P’s weren’t able to recall the investigation properly due to the verbs that were given. strengths | weaknesses | * | * It lacks mundane realism because it isn’t likely to happen in real life. * It was done in a lab therefore it lacks ecological validity. It is within an artificial setting * P may not be emotionally aroused as they watch a video because it is not the same as real life * P also may not feel any sense of responsibility as they would have felt in real life. * Because P’s took part in all the studies they might have shown demand characteristics. * Small sample size limits generalizability |

Effects of age on eyewitness testimony.
Aim: conducted an experiment to see if age affects recall ability (1993).
Method: He got a young woman to stop people in the street and chat to them for 15 seconds and then 2 minutes later they were asked to recall the characteristics of the woman. They conducted this on 651 participants (P’s). The results showed that all age groups performed similarly, but younger people were more confident in their recall, and so concluded that age doesn’t affect EWT. This study was a field experiment and this means that the P’s responses would have been more ecologically valid than if it was conducted in a laboratory which lacks mundane realism. However, it lacks reliability because it would be hard to repeat and own age bias suggests that the younger P’s would have found it easier to recall the young woman, so the results would also be less valid.

Anastasi and Rhodes performed an experiment in 2006 to see if recall is better when identifying people from the same age range (own age bias). They showed 24 photos to 3 age groups and then later they were shown 48 photos and had to identify the original 24. They found that generally the younger age groups were better at recall, but all age groups were better at recognising their own age group. They concluded that it’s easier to recall people in your own age range. This experiment was conducted in a lab, so lacks mundane realism and so would have affected the results. Also, individual differences would have affected the results because some of the photos may look like people you know, so recall would be better.

Effects of anxiety on eyewitness testimony
Yuille & Cutshall (1986)
They interviewed 13 witnesses to a real life shooting in which a storeowner in America was injured and the thief was shot dead. Some of the witnesses had been very close to the incident whist others had viewed it from a distance away. The researchers found that the witnesses closest to the event gave the most detail, that all of the witnesses were able to give accurate accounts several months later, that they were seemingly unaffected by misleading questions, and that the witnesses that had been the most distressed at the time of the incident actually gave the most accurate testimony several months later.

Christianson & Hubinette (1993)
110 witnesses of 22 real life bank robberies were interviewed some time after the robberies. Some of the witnesses had been onlookers or customers in the bank, and others were bank employees who had been directly threatened or subjected to violence during the robberies. The findings were that the victims were surprisingly accurate in their recall of the robbers’ clothing and behaviour, and that the accuracy was still evident 15 months later.

The results of these studies are surprising as they are completely opposite to those that inverted U theory and weapon focus would predict. The witnesses were neither so distressed that their cognitive performance was very low, nor was their attention overly absorbed by the presence of a weapon. But as it was an uncontrolled study then it could be that the witnesses had discussed the shooting so often, been interviewed so many times, and even read about the event in the newspapers that their memories may not be entirely their own.