{"id":11718,"date":"2019-02-18T05:42:30","date_gmt":"2019-02-17T20:42:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themantic-education.com\/ibpsych\/?p=11718"},"modified":"2019-02-05T05:43:02","modified_gmt":"2019-02-04T20:43:02","slug":"key-studies-weapon-focus-and-its-effects-on-eye-witness-memories-loftus-1987","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themantic-education.com\/ibpsych\/2019\/02\/18\/key-studies-weapon-focus-and-its-effects-on-eye-witness-memories-loftus-1987\/","title":{"rendered":"Key Studies: “Weapon focus” and its effects on eye-witness memories (Loftus, 1987)"},"content":{"rendered":"

From decades of research we know that memory is not a passive cognitive process, but it is an active reconstructive one. As Elizabeth Loftus says, memory is not like a tape recorder that records things accurately and plays it back for us, but it’s more like a wikipedia page that anyone can go in and change. Loftus should know as she’s been studying memory since the 1970s and is the most prominent psychologist working in this field.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Loftus’s studies and others like them have had an enormous influence in the American legal system (and in other countries, too, I’m sure) whereby if someone is identified by an eye-witness as the guilty person they are not automatically assumed to be guilty. This is because hundreds of accused criminals (mostly men) have been released from jail because DNA evidence shows they did not commit the crime they were in jail for. In many cases they were imprisoned because an eye-witness got it wrong.<\/p>\n

\"Innocence_Project_founders_Barry_Scheck_&_Peter_Neufeld,_executive_director_Madeline_deLone,_and_board_chair_Senator_Rodney_Ellis\"

These people started “The Innocence Project” – a project with the mission of releasing innocent people from prison, many of whom are there because of faulty eye-witness testimony. To date, over 300 people have been proven innocent and released. (wikicommons)<\/p><\/div>\n

So how can eye-witnesses be wrong so often? This is something that researchers have been studying for years. One possible explanation is “weapon focus<\/strong>” – the cognitive phenomenon whereby if a weapon is present our attention is drawn to the weapon and away from other details of the scene, which means our memory of other details (like the face of the person holding the weapon) is reduced.<\/p>\n

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Key Study #1: The original weapon focus study\u00a0<\/b>(Johnson and Scott, 1976\u00b9) <\/b><\/h3>\n

One critique of Loftus\u2019 original research involving car crashes was that she was testing memory in situations where there was little emotional impact or stress involved. Studies into the effect that the presence of a weapon has on memory, addressed this limitation.<\/span><\/p>\n

The participants in this study were asked to wait in a waiting room. There were two conditions in this experiment:<\/span><\/p>\n