Leading Questions and the Eyewitness Report/Elizabeth F.

Loftus David Wiles Psy-1010-013 September 30, 2013 Justice Morath

Eyewitness Memory

Scientific study shows that memory-recall can be much like storytelling when describing a certain experience or event. Especially when the experience being retrieved from the past has an increased amount of emotion such as excitement, happiness, fear, embarrassment, as well as sadness connected with it. For example, if an individual were asked to describe an exciting moment from his or her life, the individual would, while in the process of attempting to retrieve the full memory, emphasize the details of the memory that seem to make it most exciting, creating a story-like description. There is also the possibility of memories being accidentally corrupted while going through the retrieval process, which is where science has also developed a partial solution. How can corrupting memories of past experiences be an accident? Science has proven that the wording in the questions asked to the individual affect the description of the memory. In other words, memories have the potential to be altered according to the wording in the request of another individual to retrieve it. Cognitive psychologist, Elizabeth Loftus believes that the wording in questions asked immediately after an event are able to affect the responses to questions asked at a much later time. Loftus has performed a series of experiments in order to prove this theory. Each experiment, of which there were four, consisted of having a group of volunteers watch a short clip. Three of the clips involved car accidents, and the other was about a disrupted class. After the group had finished the clip or film, they were given a certain amount of questions, about what they saw. In one of the experiments, when shown a short clip of a car accident, the students were asked ten questions about the clip. The first question was asked in two different ways and divided between the group, and the last question was the same for everyone. The first questions asked had to do with a stop sign, and a right turn, (the car ran the stop sign, taking a right turn, and caused an accident). The second question given to everyone, asked them if they had seen a stop sign for the car that ran it. It was discovered that over half of the students whose first question was How fast was Car A going when it ran the stop sign? answered that they had seen

it. Of the other half of the students, who were asked How fast was Car A going when it turned right? only about one-third of them could say they saw the stop sign. These studies were to show how the way a question is worded can strengthen, or even weaken, the memory representations that correspond with the question. If the results from the study were strong enough, it could have an effect on the legal implications of questioning an eyewitness. New laws would most likely be passed that require specific wording to the questions asked when questioning a witness, or witnesses, to a robbery, a murder, or a car accident, which could generate more reliable results. In 1984, a man named Kirk Bloodsworth, was wrongly convicted, due to a corrupted visual recollection, for brutally beating and sexually assaulting a 9-year-old girl found dead in the woods. Even after being convicted of first-degree murder, and sentenced to death, Bloodsworth never wavered in his argument that he was innocent. He served 9 long years in prison before DNA testing proved without doubt that he had not killed the little girl, and he was given a full pardon. (Schacter, Gilbert, and Wegner, 2013) Kirk Bloodsworth is not the only person to have been wrongly convicted on mistaken eyewitness identification. Many of the cases in which DNA evidence led to the release of a wrongly convicted individual, were almost entirely due to mistaken eyewitnesses. Kirk Bloodsworths experience reinforces the idea that if there were certain ways in which questions were asked to an eyewitness, to expose a more accurate memory of an incident, it would have an enormous effect on the percentage of correct convictions. The number of wrongfully convicted persons would, most likely, drastically decrease. As we learn about the importance of wording in questions, it may also be important to consider the types of questions being asked. For example, before asking a witness of a robbery to describe what the burglar looked like, it may be possible to create a retrieval cue by asking the witness, where were you standing just before you noticed the robbery taking place? By asking questions such as these, it may help the witness to remember in greater detail what took place because the question created a form of episodic memory retrieval.