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Eyewitness testimony is a legal term which refers to an account given by people of an event they have

witnessed eg. a robbery or some other crime. It is often a vital factor taken into account by juries in

deciding whether defendants are guilty or not guilty. It is important, therefore, that we have some idea of

how reliable these testimonies really are.

Loftus has long argued that eyewitness testimony can be highly unreliable because our memories can

reconstruct events. 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 schemas - the way we make sense of our world. Schemas are

capable of distorting unfamiliar or unconsciously ‘unacceptable’ information in order to ‘fit in’ with our

existing knowledge or schemas.

In relation to eyewitness testimony (EWT) Loftus believed that the reconstruction of memories was one of

the reasons why EWT was often inaccurate. One way that memory could reconstruct (or distort)

information is through misleading questions. After witnessing a crime or event, a witness will be

questioned by the police, and by lawyers who may intentionally or unintentionally ask a leading question

such as “how dark was it?” as opposed to “was it dark?”. Loftus has argued that the former question could

activate schema which could influence accuracy of recall. The question activates the belief it was dark

when it actually it may have only been 6pm and not dark at all.

Loftus and her colleagues showed how quite subtle changes of wording during questioning may distort

recall (Loftus & Palmer, 1974 and Loftus & Zani, 1975) in a classic experiment. The lab experiment

involved asking participants to complete a questionnaire after witnessing videos of staged and real car

crashes. The first part of the experiment asked the participant to estimate the speed of the cars, and

changed the verb in the question to see if it influenced memory. The second part of the study asked the

participants if they saw broken glass. In both cases more dramatic verbs led to memories of a more

serious accident, and therefore higher estimated speeds / more likelihood of remembering broken glass.

The researchers concluded that memory of an event is not reliable, as it can be distorted. This is because

a memory is created from what actually happened plus information that is added to it afterwards.