Can you trust eyewitness testimony? In 1975, when she published her study at the University of Washington, Elizabeth Loftus was considered by most to be the leading researcher in the areas of memory reconstruction and eyewitness inaccuracy.
a witness’s memory of an event. Loftus created three eyewitness movie clips and gave the eyewitnesses false presupposition information. She wanted to see if her hypothesis worked. Loftus wanted to find out if the new false information may appear subsequently in new reports by the witnesses.
The Method
Elizabeth Loftus During her lifetime, Loftus studied this topic extensively, but her most influential research was in Theoretical Propositions. In this research, Loftus focused on the power of questions containing presuppositions to alter
In those three experiments false information was introduced into the minds of the people of the different groups. In experiment A the false information group, Loftus directly put false information about nonexistent objects that were NOT in their movie clip. In Experiment B the false presupposition group, Loftus put false presuppositions about the same nonexistent objects in their movie clip. Finally, in Experiment C the group
was told nothing false, and just watched the movie clip. One week later all subjects from the groups returned to answer 20 questions from their particular event.
The Major Findings Twenty four percent of the experiment A group that was directly told false information that a nonexistent object was in their movie clip, AGREED that the nonexistent object was there. Fifty four percent of the experiment B group that had falsepresupposition information put in their movie clip, AGREED that the nonexistent object was there. By contrast, nine percent of the control group C that saw the movie clip without being fed false information, came up with false information. So, I ask you, how much can you trust eyewitness testimony?