Loftus’ Eyewitness Study

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Loftus’ Eyewitness Study Aim The aim of this study was to investigate how information supplied after an event, influences a witness's memory for that event. Procedure The participants were 45 students. They were each shown seven film-clips of traffic accident ranging from 5 to 30 seconds long. Following each clip, the students were asked to write an account of the accident they had just seen. They were also asked to answer some specific questions, but the critical question was to do with the speed of the vehicles involved in the collision. There were five conditions in the experiment and the independent variable was manipulated by means of the wording of the questions. For example: Condition 1: 'About how fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?' Condition 2: 'About how fast were the cars going when they collided into each other?' Condition 3: 'About how fast were the cars going when they bumped into each other?' Condition 4: 'About how fast were the cars going when they hit each other? Condition 5: 'About how fast were the cars going when they contacted each other?' In each condition, a different verb was used to fill in the blank. These words were; smashed, collided, bumped, hit and contacted. The dependent variable was the speed estimates given by the participants Results Verb Mean estimate of speed (mph) Smashed 40.8 Collided 39.3 Bumped 38.1 Hit 34.0 Contacted 31.8 Conclusion The results in the table show that the phrasing of the question brought about a change in speed estimate. With smashed eliciting a higher speed estimate than contacted. So the harsher the verb used the faster the students thought the cars were travelling at. Evaluation The Experiment was conducted in a lab study, so enables researchers to have high control over variables (eg. age of participants) and improve validity to removes extraneous
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