About the lecture

In this lecture, we think about the impact of leading questions on eye witness testimony, focusing in particular on: (i) the active nature of memory making it vulnerable to misleading information; (ii) Loftus and Palmer’s 1974 study, which demonstrates that eye witness memory is flexible and that this flexibility is susceptible to the language used during post-event questioning; (iii) the ability for post-event questioning to create a response bias, but also to change the eye witnesses memory itself; (iv) the results from Loftus and Palmer’s 1974 study, which showed that differing verb usage to describe a car crash altered the estimated speeds of the collision given by participants; (v) the competing hypotheses, one which proposing that the differing answers were due to response bias, and the other proposing that they were due to false memories; (vi) Loftus and Palmer’s second study, which demonstrated the presence of false memories under certain questioning conditions; (vii) the take home message from this study, that questioning can have a profound impact on eye witness reporting and memory.

About the lecturer

Dr Adam Charles Harvey is a lecturer in social psychology in the department of Health and Social Sciences at the University of the West of England. Dr Charles Harvey’s research interests are in verbal lie-detection via proactive psychological interviewing. Some of Dr Charles Harvey’s recent publications include ‘Applying the asymmetric information management technique to insurance claims’ (2022) and ‘The stability bias effect amongst lie-tellers: Testing the ‘miscalibration’ and ‘strategic’ hypotheses’ (in press).