When a crime has been committed we usually call upon witnesses to stand and give their account of things that happened, but can we always trust these statements? Is our memory good enough for us to remember details correctly?
The video above is from a series on the BBC called Eyewitness, it’s a really interesting series that looks into why we can’t always trust eyewitness accounts.
I decided to write my blog on eyewitness testimony after reading a study by Loftus and Palmer, who set out to prove that we can’t always trust our memory as it can become distorted due to various factors. In their first study they showed their participants clips of car accidents that had originally been intended for driving education. Following the viewing of these clips the participants were asked to write out their account of the accidents, they then fell into one of five conditions when they were asked a question on the speed of the car, as a word was changed in each condition. The conditions are as follows –
Condition 1: ‘About how fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?’
Condition 2: ‘About how fast were the cars going when they collided into each other?’
Condition 3: ‘About how fast were the cars going when they bumped into each other?’
Condition 4: ‘About how fast were the cars going when they hit each other?
Condition 5: ‘About how fast were the cars going when they contacted each other?’
The results of this experiment showed that the way the questions were worded distorted the memory of the participants as depending on which condition they were in, their idea of how fast the car was going changed. It was found that those in the ‘smashed’ condition reported the cars to be going on average 9mph faster than those in the ‘contacted’ condition. The average reported speeds for each question are as follows –
Verb Mean estimate of speed (mph)
Smashed 40.8
Collided 39.3
Bumped 38.1
Hit 34.0
Contacted 31.8
In their second study they wanted to further investigate the effect of the verb in the question asked. They showed participants clips of car accidents again, and then questioned on the speed of the cars but this time with only three conditions. They were either asked, ‘How fast were the cars going when they hit each other?’, ‘How fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?’, or not asked a question on the speed of the car at all. A week after this the participants came back and without being shown the clip of the accident again were ask the question, ‘Did you see any broken glass?’ There was no broken glass in the video, but people who had been asked the question with the verb ‘smashed’ in it were more than twice as likely to say there was than those in the other conditions.
There are many other studies looking into eyewitness testimony and it has been found that there are many factors that can distort your memory, such as stress, the presence of a weapon, media coverage of the crime, talking to others about the situation and misleading questions. This link is a very interesting article by the BBC on eyewitness testimony http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4177082.stm .
Therefore we shouldn’t always trust the account given by an eyewitness as there are certain factors within a situation that could draw attention causing the witness to block out other factors. Gun focus is the idea that you will focus on a weapon, and therefore not the offenders’ appearance so your account of what they look like and the situation as a whole will be distorted because you will just focus on the weapon (Loftus et al, 1987). Talking to other people about the situation can cause you to believe you have seen things that weren’t really there, and as we have seen in the Loftus and Palmer study above misleading questions can make us think we have seen something that we haven’t or distort our perceptions of the situation.
But, I believe we still need the accounts of eyewitnesses we just need to make sure that our questions aren’t leading and we need to get as many witnesses as possible to get a better idea of the situation from a few perspectives. We need to get statements from witnesses as soon as possible to avoid them talking about the situation but also keep an open mind that although the witness may believe their account to be true, that doesn’t necessarily mean it is. The person who commits the crime is never going to be completely truthful and therefore as distorted as the eyewitness’ testimony may be, it is still required.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022537174800113
http://www.psychblog.co.uk/ForensicPsych/OriginalStudies/4216066761247828266.pdf
This week I am going to talk about the file drawer effect and the problems with it. First of all though we need to consider what the file drawer effect actually is, I had never heard of this term before sitting down to write this blog. It’s a term that was coined by a bloke called Robert Rosenthal in the 80s and in simple terms it is basically a publication bias where research that has actually found a significant effect is handled differently to that without an effect. Dickersin et al found that research that has found a significant effect is three times more likely to be published, although this research was carried out in the 80’s so it could be considered that this may not reflect publishing today. Most of the time it is the researchers that choose not to publish work where they haven’t found an effect, possibly because they are disappointed with the fact that they didn’t find anything.
But is this the right thing to do, mainly publish work that has found an effect and just forget about the research that hasn’t? And now of course you’re shouting NO at me…
So what are the problems then…
Firstly, if we only publish data that shows an effect then it strengthens the idea that the effect is actually real. It might be the case that out of 10 pieces of research 9 of those accepted the null hypothesis but weren’t published because they found no effect, and the other 1 piece that found an effect is the only one that got published. When you take all 10 pieces of research into account you see that there isn’t enough conclusive evidence of the effect but if only 1 gets published, this is all you see and there isn’t any research to suggest the effects are solid.
Secondly psychology is trying to push itself as a science and therefore requires falsification, this is the idea that we should actively try to prove ideas wrong than right, so therefore we should be reporting the research that doesn’t find an effect in order to help falsify our theories.
So overall we can see that it is important to publish all research even if it doesn’t actually show an effect because it helps us to falsify our theories, but it can also help it to gain new ideas if we see any flaws in methodology. Most of all it puts research that has found an effect into some perspective in terms of the whole of the research out there on that topic.
http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/bul/86/3/638/
http://jama.ama-assn.org/lookup/doi/10.1001/jama.263.10.1385
In this weeks blog I am going to be exploring, evaluating and contrasting two different research methods; case studies and single case designs.
Firstly let’s tackle the ‘case study’.
Definition – A case study is an intensive analysis of an individual unit. (Wikipedia.org.)
Types of case studies:
Case studies generally have a small sample size, collect lots of detail information and tend to take place over a longer period of time. One of the most famous samples of a case study is one carried out by Freud on ‘Little Hans’ as he developed through the Oedipus complex, many of Freud’s research was carried out through case studies. Nearly every aspect of the subject’s life and history is analysed to seek patterns for causes of behaviour.
Advantages of case studies:
Disadvantages of case studies:
Right, now on to the ‘single-case design’.
Definition – Single-subject design or single-case research design is a research design most often used in applied fields of psychology, education, and human behavior in which the subject serves as his/her own control, rather than using another individual/group. (Wikipedia.org).
Single case designs require continuous assessment, behaviour is observed repeatedly, meaning that the researcher is able to see how consistent a treatment is over a period of time.
A single case design goes through the three following stages:
Advantages of a single case design:
Disadvantages of a sign case design:
Overall, we can see, despite the similar naming of these two research methods they are in fact, extremely different. I think the major difference between them is that a case study is more of a qualitative method of obtaining information of high depth and detail whereas the single case design can be quantitative looking for an effect size. The two designs have similar flaws mainly due to the small sample size meaning that they are hard to generalise.
My blog this week is going to be looking at the dangers of giving people a label, especially a psychiatric one, but also why labels can be good when used in the right way.
We label people in many different ways according to things about them, for example descriptive features such appearance or behaviours that they display. Most labels therefore are pretty harmless and they don’t majorly alter a persons’ perception of someone. Although, when we start using labels that can be considered as negative such as labeling someone as a ‘criminal’, our perceptions and actions toward that person are altered due to the stigma represented by that label. In 1973 David Rosenhan carried out research looking into the effect of labeling people and the difficulty of getting rid of the label once it has been given. He and his colleagues took on the role of pseudopatients and managed to be admitted into 11 psychiatric hospitals after being diagnosed with schizophrenia. Once in the hospitals they acted as normal and told doctors and nurses that they didn’t have a psychiatric disorder until they were discharged. On average it took them 19 days to get discharged (range of 7 to 52 days) and they were diagnosed as ‘being in remission’, and therefore the label stayed with them. The pseudopatients took notes while they were in the hospital, the nurses believed this note-taking to be due to them having schizophrenia. You can read the full research at http://www.garysturt.free-online.co.uk/rosenhan.htm. Advantages of labels:
Disadvantages and Dangers of labels.
Labels can have a serious effect so much that there is a campaign in effect to try and increase awareness about the effects of someone have a psychiatric label. Rethink.org raise the following issue –
‘For those living with mental illness, the stigma imposed upon them in society can lead to a lack of funding for services and public education, difficulty in finding employment, or in getting a mortgage, or even holiday insurance.’
Rethink.org runs fundraising events in order to finance research into the effects of psychiatric labels and also to help people deal with the stigma surrounding them.
Would just like to give a quick apology to Psucc3 as his topic was the same last week, but I found it so interesting that I wanted to give my own take on things J.
In this blog I am going to look at qualitative covert methods as well discuss the advantages and disadvantages of its use in research and discuss some examples of studies using it.
Ethnography is a method used in qualitative studies, especially in social psychology. It is used to collect information on the nature of a participant and is recorded in writing; it is collected through observation, questionnaires and interviews etc. Basically ‘ethno’ means culture and ‘graphy’ mean writing. Sometimes to get a deeper insight researchers use the method of covert ethnography, in this method participants are unaware and therefore this brings up the main ethical issue of deception. The researcher and take on either an active or a passive role, in a passive role they will observe from the ‘outside’, whereas in an active role they will take part in the actual situation. The most famous example of a researcher taking on an active role in covert ethnography is Rosenhan’s ‘Sane in Insane Places’ study. The majority of people are well are of this study, so I won’t bore you by regurgitating it again.. basically Rosenhan and his researchers got themselves admitted in to mental institutions, they then told nurses and doctors in the institutions that they were sane and didn’t need to be there and kept notes until they were discharged, the full paper can be found here http://apsychoserver.psych.arizona.edu/JJBAReprints/PSYC621/Rosenhan_On%20being%20sane%20in%20insane%20places_1973.pdf .
Now we know what covert ethnography is, and I believe when you first find out what it is you think it sounds like a really good idea, a researcher actually diving into a situation to understand in more depth, I am going to explain the problems with it.
Disadvantages:
Covert ethnography can me extremely useful and will only be permitted in extreme cases.
ellislee15 