Leading Questions On Eyewitness Testimonies

In an overview of the effect of leading questions on eyewitness testimonies, Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer (1974), found that by using leading questions eyewitnesses were more likely to mentally alter what they had witnessed to fit better with the question.

There is plenty research looking into and developing ideas of the impact of using leading questions and the main and most well-known of them all is the research of Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer. In 1974 Loftus and Palmer took a group of participants and showed them a film of two cars colliding, then the participants were randomly allocated into 5 groups and asked questions about the film. For every group there was one question that changed slightly. All participants were asked ‘about how

In the actual film there was no broken glass and so Loftus and Palmer showed that by changing the verb in one question, participants recalled incorrectly in other questions.

Loftus and Palmer conducted their investigation in a lab and so were able to establish a strong causal link between the verb used and the answers given and be sure that most of the other variables were controlled. However there are problems using a lab, one being it does not accurately represent real life and so lacks eternal validity; this is because in a real incident the eyewitness would be experiencing emotions that also affect the reliability of their recall as well as having no warning as to when the incident would happen and when it would stop, whereas, in a lab the participants knew they were going to witness a video and how long it would last.

Another fault of Loftus and Palmers research is that the participants were all American male university students and so the results couldn’t be generalized to all the differences in the