Transcript Article analysis

ARTICLE ANALYSIS
OVERALL, YOU ARE NOT LINKING THE CONCEPTS INTO
THE ARTICLES BUT DISCUSSING THE 2 SEPARATELY
ONE EXAMPLE
 Both articles show that Eyewitness testimony can be inaccurate and unreliable as a form of evidence during the jurisdiction
process as it may see innocent people sentenced for a crime they didn’t commit. There are many explanations in Psychology
to explain why someone who witnessed the event can end up with incorrect information about what happened.
 In article one the police identified William Mills from a CCTV camera where the image was distorted and the perpetrator
was wearing a scarf over his mouth and chin, and sunglasses over his eyes.
 This reduces the chance of an accurate description as the image provided was not clear enough.
What theory /
research could I now mention?
 Bartletts theory of reconstructive memory explains how when something we are presented with doesn’t quite make
sense (not cultural to us, different language etc.) we alter the event according to our pre-existing schema’s so that the event
does make sense; Bartlett’s war of the ghosts study shows this, participants altered a story originally from a different culture
so that it made sense in ours. This theory can help explain the second article more than the first as because the police
randomly shooting a man at close range doesn’t usually happen they brought in their schema’s of terrorists and the ongoing
processes to allow what they had just saw to make sense to them. It also says that gaps in our memory, things we can’t recall
at all, are filled in with information that isn’t accurate.
 Another concept is ‘Weapons Focus’, What
article could I link this theory / research to?
when tied in with reconstructive memory it can help explain article 2 as eye witnesses would have focused on the police’s
gun rather than the rest of the event (i.e. Mr Menezes); the gun would be highly unusual and high in threat in the context of
a train station and as Pickel found in her research, this combination provides poorest recall of the event. In article one the
police identified William Mills from a CCTV camera where the image was distorted and the perpetrator was wearing a scarf
over his mouth and chin and sunglasses over his eyes.
 Loftus and Palmer studied the effect of leading questions on EWT and found that by using different verbs in a question
(smashed, hit, contacted) you end up with different answers to the same question, even though they’d all seen the same
event (i.e. estimation of speed). What does this show? What should I tell the police?
This shows that police have to be extremely careful in how they interview witnesses after a crime to prevent this.
 Media coverage can alter a memory as they print inaccuracies about a crime throughout the investigation; if an eyewitness
see’s these then they may replace their own memory (that’s accurate) with what’s in the paper, feeling it’s likely to be more
likely and subconsciously doubting themselves. What theory / research could I mention here?
 Overall I feel that EWT is flawed with inaccuracies and in order for it to be accepted as evidence in a trial it must be
backed up with other evidence and statements should be taken before other factors can begin altering the memory of the
event. It’s still a crucial part of evidence and when DNA evidence is rarely found at a crime scene, sometimes it’s all there
is.
EXAMPLE 2
 The overall conclusion of these two articles is that eyewitness testimony
is not always reliable. There have been numerous cases in the past where
an innocent individual has been wrongfully convicted of a crime on the
basis of eyewitness testimony, such as that of William Mills and
Jean Charles de Menezes. What the articles try to find
explanations for is how numerous witnesses can all incorrectly identify a
suspect.
 Valentine and Davis showed that 33% of participants will identify the wrong person from a
close-up, high-quality image. The main element of eyewitness testimony is facial recognition,
and witnesses are often required to recall the features of a face in great detail - despite
having never seen it before the incident - which can be very difficult. In Mills’s case,
the suspect’s face was obscured, which means the eyewitnesses would not have
had a detailed view of his face at the time of the robbery, making it far more difficult to
describe the suspect’s face in accurate detail.
Craik and Lockhart’s ‘levels of processing model’ could be used to explain
the difficulty witnesses have in recalling a suspect’s face, as this sort of information is generally
processed visually, which is the weakest form of processing, leading to poorer recall.
Moreover, if it is so difficult to remember a face from a high quality image, as Valentine and
Davis have shown, then it must be much harder to do so accurately with a poor-quality
CCTV image.
 Regarding identity parades, psychologists have identified various elements of this
process which may influence the reliability of eyewitness testimonies, such as leading
questions from the police interviewers. Loftus and Palmer (1974)
demonstrated how leading questions can distort a participant’s memory of an event, and it
may be that some questions the police ask the witness lead to a biased account of the
crime. Wells et al. also demonstrated the distorting effects of feedback on a witness’s
memory. In this study, the participants watched a video of a crime, and were later asked to
identify the culprit from a line-up (in which the culprit was not present). They were given
confirming, disconfirming or no feedback at all about the identification they had made, and
the study found that those given confirming feedback were more confident about their
identification – even though it was wrong - implying that their memory had been altered by
this factor. Feedback from the police such as this is a form of post-event information, which
is incorporated into the witness’s memory of the event, causing it to become unreliable
 Bartlett’s theory of reconstructive memory claims that our memories
are actively reconstructed upon retrieval using all available information –
including pre-existing schemas and any post-event info. Schemas can shape a
witness’s perception of an event, as information is distorted to fit in with our
existing thoughts.
For example, witnesses of the Stockwell shooting admitted to having
misinterpreted what they saw, since the sight of a coloured man running on
the tube station around that time would have easily triggered the thought of a
terrorist bomber, resulting in a distorted perception of the actual event, and
thus an unreliable witness account.
Increased levels of stress can also lead to inaccurate recollections of events, as the
Yerkes-Dodson law states that recall is best in ‘moderately arousing conditions’.
The surveillance police responsible for identifying Menezes would have likely
been under intense stress and pressure to stop a terrorist attack from occurring, and
this fear could have led to poor memory for the facial features of the real suspect,
resulting in the misidentification.
‘Weapon focus’ can also be experienced by eyewitnesses, as the presence of a
weapon – like the police’s guns, or the perceived weapon de
Menezes was “carrying” – can lead to the witness’s attention becoming
narrowed onto the weapon, resulting in poor recall for other details about the
incident. Pickel’s (1998) study evidences this as the participants who watched a clip
including a weapon could not provide so many details about the culprit as the
participants who did not see a weapon.