Eyewitness testimony (EWT) is the evidence given by a witness to a crime or accident, drawing on their memory of the event. For AQA Psychology you need to explain two main factors that affect how accurate EWT is: misleading information and anxiety. The big takeaway is that memory is reconstructive — it can be distorted after the event — so EWT is far less reliable than juries tend to assume.
A leading question is phrased in a way that suggests a particular answer. The classic study is Loftus & Palmer (1974). Participants watched film clips of car crashes and were asked how fast the cars were going when they “smashed”, “collided”, “bumped”, “hit” or “contacted” each other. The verb changed the estimate: “smashed” produced a mean of about 40.8 mph versus about 31.8 mph for “contacted”.
In a follow-up a week later, participants who had heard “smashed” were more likely to falsely report seeing broken glass (there was none). This suggests leading questions can do more than bias a response in the moment — they can alter the stored memory itself (the substitution explanation).
When co-witnesses discuss an event before being interviewed, their memories can converge — memory conformity. Gabbert et al. (2003) showed that 71% of participants who discussed an event with another “witness” went on to recall details they had not actually seen, picked up from their partner. This matters in real investigations where witnesses talk to each other at the scene.
Anxiety can both reduce and improve accuracy, which is why exam questions often ask you to weigh up the evidence. The weapon-focus effect (Johnson & Scott, 1976) suggests anxiety narrows attention onto a weapon at the expense of other details: participants who saw a man holding a bloodied knife were worse at identifying him than those who saw him holding a pen.
But anxiety can also enhance recall. Yuille & Cutshall (1986) interviewed real witnesses to a shooting in Vancouver and found the most anxious witnesses were highly accurate even five months later. The contradiction is usually resolved with the Yerkes-Dodson inverted-U: moderate arousal aids recall, but very low or very high arousal impairs it.
Real-world application is a major strength: this research directly informed the cognitive interview and has reshaped how courts treat eyewitness evidence, especially given DNA-exoneration cases built on mistaken identification.
A key limitation is low ecological validity. Watching a clip of a crash is nothing like the stress of witnessing a real one, so lab findings may not generalise. Studies like Loftus & Palmer also relied on student samples and may be open to demand characteristics.
The weapon-focus effect may be about surprise rather than anxiety. Pickel (1998) found accuracy dropped most when an object was unusual for the setting (e.g. a raw chicken in a hairdressing salon), suggesting it is unexpectedness, not threat, that distracts the witness.