Question

Please Write a 6 paged paper on eyewitness. Its psychology view point.

Answer 1

It refers to an account given by people of an event they have witnessed.

For example they may be required to give a description at a trial of a robbery or a road accident someone has seen. This includes identification of perpetrators, details of the crime scene etc.

Eyewitness testimony is an important area of research in cognitive psychology and human memory.

Juries tend to pay close attention to eyewitness testimony and generally find it a reliable source of information. However, research into this area has found that eyewitness testimony can be affected by many psychological factors:

• Anxiety / Stress
• Reconstructive Memory
• Weapon Focus

study by Yuille and Cutshall (1986) contradicts the importance of stress in influencing eyewitness memory.

They showed that witnesses of a real life incident (a gun shooting outside a gun shop in Canada) had remarkable accurate memories of a stressful event involving weapons. A thief stole guns and money, but was shot six times and died.

Bartlett ’s theory of reconstructive memory is crucial to an understanding of the reliability of eyewitness testimony as he suggested that recall is subject to personal interpretation dependent on our learnt or cultural norms and values, and the way we make sense of our world.

Many people believe that memory works something like a videotape. Storing information is like recording and remembering is like playing back what was recorded. With information being retrieved in much the same form as it was encoded. However, memory does not work in this way. It is a feature of human memory that we do not store information exactly as it is presented to us. Rather, people extract from information the gist, or underlying meaning.

Eyewitness testimony is critically important to the justice system. Indeed, it is necessary in all criminal trials to reconstruct facts from past events, and eyewitnesses are commonly very important to this effort. Psychological scientists, however, have challenged many of the assumptions of the legal system and the general public regarding the accuracy of eyewitness accounts. Particularly dominant in the psychological science literature are the views that memory reports are malleable (i.e., changed by suggestive questioning), that witnesses can be made to be extremely confident in inaccurate memories, and that police lineups should follow a careful protocol in order to avoid high rates of mistaken identification. The principal methods used by psychological scientists for examining the accuracy of eyewitnesses involve creating events that unsuspecting people witness and then collecting their reports about what they saw. Because the events were created by the researchers, these reports can be scored for their accuracy and completeness. In this way, researchers can systematically manipulate various factors (such as stress, view, the use of misleading questions, the instructions given prior to a lineup) to determine what variables influence accuracy and completeness. This body of research has its programmatic origins in the mid- to late 1970s, but it received a large boost to its credibility in the 1990s, when forensic DNA testing began to uncover convictions of innocent people. Over 75 percent of these exonerations are cases involving mistaken eyewitness identification. The discovery of these mistaken identifications and resulting wrongful convictions has been a jarring event for the legal system and threatens public faith in the criminal justice system. Accordingly, eyewitness research today is having a larger impact on the legal system as the legal system recognizes that eyewitness errors are leading to faulty trial outcomes. The scientific literature on eyewitness testimony that has emerged is an important development in showing the relevance of social science for helping to solve problems in the legal system. An increased use of eyewitness experts at trial and revisions to how eyewitnesses are interviewed and how lineups are conducted represent concrete legal system improvements resulting from this line of research.

Although the research clearly points to methods for improving the reliability of eyewitness testimony, there is no national policy guiding how law enforcement agencies gather eyewitness identifications. Historically, researchers have worked to push the Department of Justice and state enforcement agencies to create such a national policy based on the research. And while APA supports such research-based guidelines, there are important battles taking place in the courts, says Gilfoyle.

As the leading association of psychologists in the United States, APA is well-positioned to contribute to judicial understanding of the weight and robust nature of the psychological research on eyewitness testimony, says Gilfoyle. So, at the request of several researchers and the Innocence Project — a national organization of lawyers and public policy experts dedicated to preventing wrongful convictions through reforming the criminal justice system — APA wrote briefs summarizing the research articles that show the limitations of eyewitness identification that have been published since 1977, when the U.S. Supreme Court last considered the issue.