Eyewitness Testimony PDF

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Running head: EYEWITNESS TESTIMONY

Eyewitness Testimony Grand Canyon University: PSY 102 February 19, 2020

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2 EYEWITNESS TESTIMONY Eyewitness Testimony When a person experiences or witnesses a traumatic event, they may not know how to respond directly, and maybe even be in a state of denial about the effect such an event had. And like all memories, traumatic memories are specifically malleable and prone to distortion. With eyewitness memory playing an important role in reconstructing factual elements of a crime, assessing the accuracy of eyewitness testimony, however, has proven to be a difficult task. Factors potentially responsible for derailing the memory and perception of eyewitness includes suggestibility, false memories, leading questions and all other post-event details. Regardless of the consequences in miscarriage of legal procedure leading to imprisonment of wrong and innocent people, relatively little amount of research has examined the proper methods of determining reliability of eyewitness testimony. The purpose of this paper is to freely examine recent articles particularly seeking to extend research on eyewitness testimony and memory recall. The author will make an attempt at analyzing each chosen article and simply discuss the reliability of eyewitness testimony summarized from both of them. The first article (Gustafsson, 2019) provides insight on a conducted study aiming to grade the quality of the Lindholm et al. (2018) study results, by performing similar methods and elaborating the main hypotheses of their research. With Lindholm et al. (2018) in mind, the main purpose of the study in this article was to further depth the exploration of the previously indicated correlation between confidence and eyewitness accuracy with retrieval effort cues acting as the mediator (Gustafsson, 2019, para. 10). Extending earlier findings, the study also evaluates effort cue response latency and inspects its contribution along with other effort cues in predicting the accuracy of eyewitness testimony (para. 10). Conducting methods involve showing a simulated crime on video to informed twenty-two psychology students. Afterwards, the participants were

3 EYEWITNESS TESTIMONY videotaped while being questioned about the event. Categories of effort cues examined throughout the process of questioning and response included delays, non-word fillers, word fillers, hedges, and response latency. The outcome of this study points out that the results mainly replicates the hypotheses, just as well as the results from Lindholm et al. (2018), that correct responses were simply faster than incorrect responses. However, a rougher, but more comprehensive measure of impediments before and during a response explains more variance in accuracy than response latency. In the second article (Dahl, 2018), the analysis provided is directed on a real-life case, where police responded to a stabbing incident, which eventually ended with the police shooting the perp, who refused to obey the officer’s command. At some point throughout the event, two witnesses started to film the incident with their mobile phones from two different angles. This later came in handy in determining the accuracy of eyewitness testimony. Shortly after the incident, a total of nineteen eyewitnesses was abruptly taken in for questioning to provide details about the incident. The interview was completed in a total length of three days with interviewees consisting of nine civilians and four police officers. Considering that this is a real-life case, procedures were not as organized compared to a conducted study, emotions and stress may be the cause of the results that were flagrant with components of uncertainty and misinterpretation. Speculations and biases were also pointed out in between these interviews. There was one point when one officer commented on the differences between a statement from the interview and a film, stating that he “could see how it happened, but that was not how he experienced it”. This analysis blatantly demonstrates how vulnerable perception and memory to be distorted in the events of a traumatic experience.

4 EYEWITNESS TESTIMONY Based upon the two articles, it is reasonable to summarize that the reliability of an eyewitness testimony depends on many uncontrollable measures. Verifying the accuracy of it requires precision within a long process of switching out retrieval cues and looking things through many different psychological angles. In other words, in order to reach a state of ease in examining eyewitness testimony, and also considering the late start of explosion of research on the topic that didn’t occur until the late 1970s, development of predicting accuracy of eyewitness testimony will need more time for it to its prime (Long, 2019). For now, through modern research, reliability of eyewitness testimony will grow in the ways of simply interrogating a witness, how to properly construct a lineup, as well as how to guide the witness to reconstruct memories correctly.

In conclusion, analyzing the accuracy of eyewitness testimony within these two distinct articles, clearly shows the differences between a conducted study and a real life-case. Applying these methods of predicting memory accuracy from the first article to a real-life criminal case requires process and evaluation. Finally, the verdict on eyewitness testimony seems to be that the memories in the human brain are far too malleable to be considered reliable information..

5 EYEWITNESS TESTIMONY References Gustafsson, P. U., Lindholm, T., & Jonsson, F. U. (2019). Predicting Accuracy in Eyewitness Testimonies With Memory Retrieval Effort and Confidence. Frontiers in Psychology. https://doi-org.lopes.idm.oclc.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00703 Dahl, M., Granér, S., Per-Anders Fransson, Bertilsson, J., & Fredriksson, P. (2018). Analysis of eyewitness testimony in a police shooting with fatal outcome – manifestations of spatial and temporal distortions. Cogent Psychology, 5(1) doi: http://dx.doi.org.lopes.idm.oclc.org/10.1080/23311908.2018.1487271 Lindholm, T., Jönsson, F. U., and Tullio-Liuzza, M. (2018). Retrieval effort cues predict eyewitness accuracy. J. Exp. Psychol. 24, 534–542. doi: 10.1037/xap0000175 Long, G. T. (2019). Eyewitness testimony and memory. Salem Press Encyclopedia of Health....