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Question 45

Report: Public Misconceptions in the Courtroom

A report by the Justice Reform Commission analyzed how jurors evaluate eyewitness testimony. The commission highlighted two key statistics from their recent survey of prospective jurors and experts:

  • 74% of prospective jurors believed that "human memory works like a video camera, recording events exactly as they unfold so they can be played back later." In contrast, only 1% of cognitive psychologists agreed with this statement.
  • 62% of prospective jurors believed that "if a witness is extremely confident when testifying on the stand, their recollection of the event is almost certainly accurate." However, 95% of memory researchers stated that confidence does not reliably correlate with accuracy, as post-event details can artificially inflate a witness's confidence.

Describe the Loftus and Palmer (1974) study into eyewitness testimony and explain how its findings relate to the report above.

[6]
Markscheme

Memory Questions

  1. A Level
  2. /Psychology
  3. /Memory

163 exam-style questions on OCR A Level Psychology Memory, covering Loftus and Palmer (1974): Eyewitness testimony and Grant et al. (1998): Context-dependent memory. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.

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