Importance Of Witness Testimony

Witness testimony is important to be accurate for judges, prosecutors and indirectly for all of us. The errors and distortions in testimony happen not necessarily on purpose. The witness is a participant in the proceedings, which provides a means of assumption evidence in the form of testimony. Witness testimony is one of the evidence on this subject in general the same evaluation rules as other evidence.

Human behaviour in a situation of receiving or giving evidence can be understood as participation in a social situation.

One of the most important reports of experimental social psychology on the evaluation of evidence is overestimating the accuracy of testimony.

The main problem in witness testimony from the psychological point of view is to determine the degree of the credibility of the testimony. Factors to be considered are the personality and motivation of the witness resulting from certain situations in which witness was in relation to the offender at the time of a crime.

Testimony is formulated in three steps : obtaining content information ( perception ) , memorizing and storing them in memory and interview.

Perception is a complex system of processes, which create subjective picture called observation. It occurs when appropriate stimuli interact with senses. There are two levels of human perception:

-sensorimotor - receiving, encoding and processing information about the object properties of the elements of the environment.

- semantic operations - connecting elements of the environment with previously learned objects from previous experiences.

According to scientists perception depends on : age, gender of the observer , accurateness of the senses, selectivity of perception, attitude of the observer.

At percep...

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...imes be put on person of certain race or nationality.

G. Allport conducted an experiment in which he showed photos of people in the subway (Eberhardt et al. 2004). One of them was a white man with a razor in his hand and the other was a black man. 50% of participants claimed that they saw a black man with a razor. This experiment shows that the prejudice play an important role in memory recollection and an eye witness testimony.

These examples of experiments show how greatly our memory and recollection is influenced by many factors. The creation of false memories is still being studied

In witness testimony professionals should remember these factors, especially in a court case. The testimony of the group of friends in front of the nightclub might have been influenced by prejudice, illegal substances, previous experience with the same youth and many other factors.