Question

List and describe(in detail) three conditions under which eyewitnesses testimony is likely to be flawed or in error, and provide an original example of each to illustrate the effect on these on memory.

Answer 1

Three conditions under which eyewitnesses testimony is likely to be flawed:

1. Misinformation effect: A phenomenon in which the memory of an eyewitness gets altered after being exposed to some misleading information about the event. This phenomenon was investigated by Elizabeth Loftus. This is the reason why police often tries to prevent two or more witnesses of any event from talking to each other. This was investigated in a series of experiments. In one study, subjects viewed a slide presentation of a traffic accident. The actual slide presentation contained a stop sign, but in a written summary of the presentation, the sign was referred to as a yield sign. Subjects who were given this misleading information after viewing the slides were far less accurate in their memories for the kind of sign present than were subjects given no such information
2. False memory syndrome: It refers to a phenomenon that takes place when an individual alters his/her memory in response to a suggestion, most commonly offered during a state of hypnosis. Research has shown that hypnosis tends to increase an individual's confidence in his/her memories regardless of whether they are true or false (Bowman, 1996)
3. Errors in Identification: Eyewitnesses often have to remember faces along with the details of the crime. As a result, they often make errors in identification. For eg, in 1984, Jennifer Thompson was brutally raped. She ended up identifying an innocent man as the rapist who then served a decade in prison.