Chas Wakeman

2/23/2015
Psychology 111
Ms. Donegan

Thanks for the Memories!

Could you imagine being wrongfully convicted of a crime you didn t commit or giving a
false confession? Unfortunately these things happen far more than you think . Eyewitness
accounts are not as valid as we make them out to be and the way we deliver a question can also
trick the mind into thinking a false presupposition actually existed . Researcher Elizabeth Loftus
from the University of Washington is a leading researcher of human memory , she has found that
when we recall an event it becomes inaccurately re-constructed . The hypothesis Loftus was
testing in this particular experiment was about how changing a question was worded could alter a
persons reconstruction of an event.
Loftus main point of this experiment was the concept of presuppositions to alter
memory. So, for example if asked the question pertaining to a car accident how many people
were in the car speeding?(pg. 118) the word the in this question makes you assume the car was
actually speeding. To test this theoretical proposition Loftus set up 4 experimental research
studies. In the first study Loftus put 150 participants into small groups and showed a film of a
five car accident that was produced when a driver ran a stop sign into oncoming traffic, the video
lasted only 4 seconds. After the video the participants were given a questionnaire with 10

Chas Wakeman
2/23/2015
Psychology 111
Ms. Donegan
questions. For half of the participants the first question asked how fast was car A going when it
ran the stop sign? for
the other half the question was how fast was car A going when it turned right? Then the last
question was the same for all participants it asked: did you see a stop sign for car A? In the
first half 40 participants said they saw the stop sign for car A, only 26 in the other half said they
saw the stop sign, Loftus thought this difference in numbers was significantly different. The last
two experiments, 3 and 4 seemed to have the most effect and were more important to the study
overall. Experiment 3 was designed to see if a false presupposition present in a question could
cause eye witnesses to reconstruct their memory of an event by including objects that werent
really there. 150 university students partook in the study, watching a short video with a white
sports car and answered 10 questions. One question for only half of the participants asked how
fast the sports car was going when it passed the barn on a country road and the other halfs
question asked how fast the sports car was going along the country road. The participants
returned a week later answering to new questions about seeing the barn. Out of all the
participants where the barn was mentioned, thirteen answered yes, to only two in the non-barn
group. The final experiment of this study was the most important because it tested two theories.
Loftus wanted to further the test the memory reconstruction effects similar to experiment 3,
Loftus also wanted to test if mentioning of an object would interfere with the reconstruction
process. This experiment involved 50 participants put into three groups that viewed a 3 minute
film of a car colliding with a baby carriage pushed by a man and answered a booklet of questions
after. Group D the dependent variable, received 40 filler questions and 5 questions directly
asking about objects that were never really there. Group F the independent variable, were the

Chas Wakeman
2/23/2015
Psychology 111
Ms. Donegan
false presupposition group which received the same amount of filler questions as group D and 5
questions pertaining to presuppositions of non-existent objects. Group C the control group
received just 40 filler questions. A week later they answered 20 new questions 5 of the questions
remained the same asked to just Group D, combining all the questions from every group 29.2%
answered yes to the direct questions of the false presuppositions group, 15.6% for the direct
question group, and 8.4% for the control group.(Hock pg. 121) comparing the percentages
shows a huge differences in each group.
These research findings are extremely important because it proves that eyewitness
accounts are not as valid as we claim them to be and are found to very inaccurate in the
reconstruction because of presuppositions and the way we are asked a certain question. In our
textbook Psychology by Saundra K. Ciccarelli there is a summary of Loftuss research findings
stating that people continually update and revise their memories of events without being aware
that theyre doing so and incorporate information gained after whether it is true or not.
(Ciccarelli pg. 233)
Being a major in criminal justice I feel its extremely important to take in account that
eyewitness accounts arent always the most reliable piece of evidence and when making
statements about a crime to try and avoid getting inaccurate information from eyewitnesses.

Chas Wakeman
2/23/2015
Psychology 111
Ms. Donegan

Works cited
Hock, R. Roger. Forty Studies That Changed Psychology Upper Saddle River: Pearson
Education Inc., 2005
Ciccarelli, Saundra, and Noland J. White. Psychology. Boston: Pearson, 2013. Print.