Describe and evaluate research into at least one factor affecting the accuracy of eyewitness testimony.

One piece of research that has explored factors affecting the accuracy of eyewitness testimony, comes from Loftus and Palmer (1974). These researchers investigated the impact of leading questions on the accuracy of eyewitness testimony, where the wording/ phrasing of a certain question leads the interviewee to a certain response. In this study, participants were shown a video clip of a car crash, and were then asked to estimate how fast the cars were going during the incident. However, the independent variable, manipulated by the researchers, was the wording they used when posing this questions to the participants. They were asked; How fast were the cars going when they crashed into each other? However, the word 'crashed' varied across five conditions, with each word varying in intensity and connotations: contacted, hit, bumped, collided, or smashed. The dependent variable in this study was the quantitive estimate participants provided in response. The researchers found that the average speed estimation increased as the word got more intense. With 'contacted', the average speed estimation was 31mph. This is in contrast to 'smashed', where the average speed was 41mph. These findings show how the wording of a question can drastically influence the accuracy and reliability of an eye witness testimony.
This research has multiple strengths. For instance, a positive evaluation is the amount of control in the study. This is because it was undertaken in a laboratory setting. Researchers were therefore able to limit the amount of extraneous variables confounding the dependent variable. One such extraneous variable might be if participants were fully attending to the incident, but as it was shown to them on a screen, researchers were able control this, and ensure participants were attending. Another benefit of the study was the real world application. This is because the study provides important implications to the real world, offering police officers and other law officials the knowledge that the way they pose questions has a tremendous impact on the accuracy and reliability of an eyewitnesses account. In contrast, the controlled, laboratory setting also poses a limitation of this study. This is because it lacks ecological validity. This was a simulated incident, with participants watching on a screen. One could argue that this cannot be accurately applied to the real world, as in real incidents, there is a multitude of external factors influencing eye witnesses. For instance, anxiety, adrenaline and danger to the witness. These factors are ignored in Loftus and Palmers' (1974) investigation, which limits their findings from being 100% reliability generalised to real incidents.