Eyewitness testimonies (EWT) as a whole are
flawed and improvements to the whole EWT process need to be made. Such errors often have
tragic consequences. According to the Innocence Project, a legal advocacy
group, about 75% of false convictions that are later overturned are based on
false eyewitness testimonies. In recent years, neuroscientists have documented
how these mistakes happen. It turns out that the act of summoning the past to
the surface actually changes the memory itself. The more you remember an event,
the less reliable that memory becomes. Eyewitnesses are repeatedly asked to
recall what they saw, but their answers are inevitably influenced by the
questions being asked. The result is more confidence in an increasingly less
accurate testimony. A test carried out by Dr. Brewer in which participants were
to identify criminals in short clips from 12 pictures. Normally, witnesses are
encouraged to take their time and carefully consider each possible suspect.
However Dr. Brewer only gave his participants two seconds to make their
decision and he also asked them to rate how confident they were about their
decision. Brewer’s version of the lineup led to a large boost in accuracy, with
improvements in eyewitness performance ranging from 21% to 66%. Even when
subjects were quizzed a week later, those who were forced to choose quickly
remained far more trustworthy. Instead of simply assessing our familiarity with
a suspect’s face, we begin searching for clues and guidance. Sometimes this
involves picking the person who looks the most suspicious, even if we’ve never
seen them before, or being swayed by the subtle hints of police officers and
lawyers. This shows that there is three main ways in which EWT can be improved:
repeating the testimony as little as possible, making more of an instant
judgement rather than deliberating and making sure that the questions,
responses, attitude or body language given by police officers, interrogators
etc. don’t give a hint towards any certain answer. However, even if these
improvements were implemented we still wouldn’t be able to completely trust
EWTs as human errors will still be there and these methods only improved the
accuracy by 66% in Brewer’s test.

Loftus Taco time study •In
this study the participants were shown a
series of slides of a customer in a restaurant.  In one version
of the slides, the
customer was holding a gun,
while in
the other the same customer held a checkbook. •Participants
seeing the gun
version tended to focus
primarily on
the gun.  Consequently
they were
less likely to be
able to identify the
customer in a
line up than those who
had seen the checkbook version. •This
shows that fear and stress caused by a dangerous weapon can affect a witness’s
memory recall. •Could
have extraneous variables – could have bad memory before hand so results aren’t
reliable. •Lacks
ecological validity. •Cant
generalise because some were able to identify them in a line up. Is
an ethical study – slides not real situation

Pickle •In
1997 a man
walked into a coffee shop in Toronto and threatened to kill a hostage unless
someone gave him some money. The
customers met the robber’s demands and therefore he released his hostage and
fled the scene. However what was unusual about this was that the hostage was in
fact a Goose which the perpetrator had brought with him and threatened to
choke. •The
witnesses were so stricken by the absurdity of what they had observed that they
had spent more time inspecting the goose than inspecting the robber. •This
illustrates how the presence of  an
obscure object can impair memory for the peripheral details of an event. The
idea is that eyewitnesses tend to focus their attention on striking or
informative objects within a visual scene, to the detriment of other important
details such as the identity of the perpetrator.