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Comparing Loftus And Palmer's Eyewitness Testimony

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Comparing Loftus And Palmer's Eyewitness Testimony
This essay will talk about Eyewitness Testimony. What it is, the reliability with statistics, Loftus and Palmer (1974) experiment, strengths, weaknesses and a conclusion. Eyewitness testimony is a description of what a witness saw of a crime or accident. This legal term is used to describe when a witness or victim is telling their personal experience to another individual or a court-case.

Eyewitness accounts can be inaccurate by several issues, such as; stress, or outside influences; leading questions and misattribution of memory. The legal profession should consider the unreliability to not punish an innocent person. In the USA, DNA tests show that 200 people have been found innocent, and 75% of them were found guilty based on mistaken eyewitness identification. These statistics show that innocent people have been found guilty and punished for a crime they never committed (Eysenck & Keane, 2010).

Loftus and Palmer’s aim was how information after an event influenced witness’ memory. The independent variable was to change the verb used, their dependant variable was to estimate the speed. In the second experiment the dependant variable was changed, and the participants were asked if they saw glass in the clip. The first experiment had 45 university students, where they watched a short clip of a car crash. …show more content…
Eyewitness testimony can be a major thing for a court-case as it can influence the decision of the judges and jury about convicting someone or not. However, eyewitness testimonies aren’t always correct and innocent people will be convicted for something that they haven’t done. Therefore, eyewitness testimonies shouldn’t always be relied upon for a crime as innocent people will be convicted of something they never
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