Leading Questions And The Eyewitness Report By Elizabeth F. Loftus

The article I chose was “Leading Questions and the Eyewitness Report,” by Elizabeth F. Loftus. This article was a report of the results of four experiments conducted to study the importance of how questions are asked. More specifically, how the wording and timing of the question can influence the subject’s answer to that question. The subjects were exposed to events such as disruptions in a classroom or car accidents - things that are sudden and quick. In all four experiments, the subjects were all from the University of Washington, and in all four experiments, the subjects were tested in groups of varying sizes. In the first experiment, the subjects were exposed to a film of a car accident, and then questioned (in two different ways) about the speed of the car.
In the second experiment, subjects were shown a film clip about a disruption in a classroom.
They were then asked a specific question about the clip, and then a week later, they were asked twenty more questions about the same clip (without having re-watched the video). Similar to the first experiment, in the third experiment, subjects watched a video of a car accident and then questioned about the speed of the car involved. This time however, unlike experiment one, the subjects were brought back a week later and were asked another ten questions about the video they had watched the week before. In the fourth experiment, the subjects watched a video of a collision between a car and a baby carriage, and asked a variety of different questions immediately after. The same subjects were then asked more questions a week later without reviewing the film. In all four experiments, the results suggested that asking a question directly following the event can skew the answer due new and sometimes false information altering or reconstructing how the event is
remembered
In my Introduction to Psychology class this semester we actually learned about Elizabeth Loftus and her experiments during our Learning and Memory lecture. We learned how she exposed subjects to car accidents, and that when she questioned them about it, their answers varied based on whether she used the word “collided” or the word “smashed” in her question. We also learned about her similar “faces” study. We also learned about other false memory studies apart from Elizabeth Loftus such as the “Innocence Project.” This project concluded that seventy-five percent of three hundred people convicted from eyewitness testimony were innocent people falsely convicted. This is because the eyewitnesses had false memories about the events, similar to how the subjects in the article had false memories or “false information” about the video clips they had watched. Also, during our Cognition, Language, and Intelligence lecture, we learned about how the wording of a question can affect our cognition and how we chose to answer the question. We were given a scenario about an outbreak of a disease in the United States, which is expected to kill six-hundred people. We were then asked to raise our hands and answer a question where we had to pick between two solutions. Next, we were asked the same question, but this time one of the two solutions was worded a little differently. It was the same question being asked both times, but the responses were very different because the question was asked a little differently the second time. This relates to the article because the article discusses how the wording of a question can affect the response.