Outline and evaluate research (theories and/or studies) into the effects of misleading information on eyewitness testimony.

Eyewitness testimony is the process of interviewing witnesses to a crime to help gain evidence and facts on what happened. Misleading information is when the interviewer provides information during that interview that may lead witnesses towards an answer that may not be correct. One study into misleading information was performed by Loftus and Palmer (1974). They showed 45 students 7 videos of a car accident. After, students completed a questionnaire about the accident. This questionnaire included the leading question 'About what speed were the cars going when they contacted/bumped/hit/collided/smashed?'. They found that the mean estimation of speed provided varied depending on what word was used in the question. For example, the mean estimation was 34.0mph when the word hit was used, and 40.8mph when the word smashed was used. This therefore shows how a question giving some indication and leading witnesses in a certain direction can have a huge influence on the details the eyewitnesses supply, suggesting eyewitness accounts may not be completely reliable due to interviewer techniques.
A strength of this study is that it is a lab study. This means it was highly controlled and standardised, making it highly replicable. Other psychologists can therefore easily replicate it to test whether similar results are found. Another strength is that it had a large sample size of 45 students. This means that it has a higher ecological validity as the sample will be less biased. However, a limitation is that it used videos of an accident. Psychologists Yuille and Cutshall found that witnesses are less likely to be mislead in an interview in real life (they interviewed witnesses to a real life robbery). Therefore, the ecological validity is weakened as witnesses may not be affected the same way in real life. This may be due to the level of anxiety. Psychologists have found that anxiety has varying affects on eyewitness, creating the U-shape bell diagram. They found moderate or high levels of anxiety and arousal limited accuracy of eyewitnesses, whereas some levels increased accuracy. This therefore suggests this study was limited when applying to real life as it doesn't reflect real levels of arousal when actually witnessing a crime. Finally, although the sample size was reasonably large, it is all students. This affects the findings as students are a biased population. Also, they have been found to be less experienced in driving meaning they are more likely to be misled during this experiment as the question on speed is more ambiguous to them.