Eye witness testimony

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AS - Level Psychology (Criminal) Flashcards on Eye witness testimony, created by Alice Storr on 29/01/2017.
Alice Storr
Flashcards by Alice Storr, updated more than 1 year ago
Alice Storr
Created by Alice Storr over 7 years ago
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Resource summary

Question Answer
Number of people found to be wrongly convicted by March 1940 40
Number of cases out of 40 where unreliable EWT was to blame 36
Estimator variables Factors which the justice system has no control eg. stress & arousal, weapon focus, confidence of the witness and facial recognition (effected by race)
System variables Factors which the justice system does have control over eg. the way questions are asked and the way a line-up is conducted
The year of the Ronald Cotton case 1984
The person who was guilty, not Ronald Cotton Bobby Poole
What is Post Event Information? Experiences of witnesses in between the event and the trial that effect the encoded information
What is the reconstruction principle? When we recover memories we use a combination of information beginning with the retrieval clue which is combined with the memory trace and then any gaps are filled in
Why do schemas cause unreliable EWT? When information goes into the schemas that contradicts previous stereotypes it distorts the new information to make it fit. This alters memories.
Study where 70 ppts were asked to give the race of the man who they thought was holding the razor - more than half said that it was the black man Allport & Postman 1947
Asking ppts what speed cars were going when they 'hit' each other rather than 'smashed into' each other determined the ppts judgement of speed Loftus & Palmer 1974
Asking ppts if they had seen 'the' broken headlight rather than 'a' broken headlight increased likelihood that ppts said yes Loftus & Zanni 1975
Findings show that you can have highly accurate and reliable recall despite leading questions Yuille & Cutshall 1986
Yerkes-Dobson Law High arousal and low arousal lead to low performance. Optimum performance is achieved when arousal is halfway between low and high arousal
MacLeod 1986 No difference in accuracy between those who saw an assault with a physical injury compared to those with no physical injury
The greater the arousal, the more accurate the testimony Yuille 1986
Those who saw a violent film had worse recall than those who saw a non-violent film (2 studies have this format) Loftus & Burns 1982 Clifford & Scott 1978
Founder of weapon focus theory Loftus obviously
Is more or less attention focussed on a weapon due to survival instincts, therefore reducing accuracy of recall? More
Counter argument from Pickel 1998 It is the unusualness of the situation that makes recall worse, not the presence of a weapon
Maas & Kohnen 1989 Descriptions of woman were better when she was holding a pen rather than a syringe
Loftus 1987 eye fixation data More time was spent with eyes on the gun rather than the cheque (around 1 second longer)
Loftus 1987 main finding Accuracy was low even in the non-violent setting (cheque, not gun) 38.9% identified correctly with cheque 11.1% identified correctly with gun
witnesses to a real armed robbery of a bank had accurate and reliable recall even 15 months after the event Christianson & Hubinette 1993
Strongest evidence for unreliability due to weapon focus provided by Steblay 1992 - what were his findings? Meta analysis of 19 studies. Significant overall difference between weapon-present and weapon-absent conditions was demonstrated.
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