Question

Eyewitnesses to crimes are not always reliable; they think they remember the facts about an event, yet they make errors. Based on your reading in the chapter, describe psychological factors having to do with memory that might account for such errors.

      If you were a police officer, lawyer, or prosecutor who had the job of interrogating witnesses and you wanted to increase eyewitness accuracy, what are some things that you might do? Give an example of a case that you have heard of or, perhaps, a person example, that illustrates the unreliability of memory.

Answer 1

A number of psychological factors play a role reducing the accuracy of eyewitness identifications and produce error in reporting, described as follows:

• Extreme stress and anxiety at the crime scene or during the process of identifying the suspect.
• ‘Weapon focus’ or the tendency to concrete almost exclusively on a weapon in the crime (leading to the diversion of attention from the suspect’s characteristics).
• Racial disparity between the witness and the suspect (characterized by the ‘same-race bias’).
• Use of leading questions by authoritative figures during the identification process.
• Reconstruction of the memory owing to subjective interpretations (based on Bartlett’s theory of reconstructive memory).

Please post the other questions separately as we are supposed to answer only one question or four subparts of a question.