Eyewitness testimony?

Question

Can someone give me an example of how eyewitness testimony is not as bad as psychologists generally believe?

Answer 1

Sometimes when you see a traumatic event but you aren't emotionally involved you can do a pretty good job of recounting the incident.
My friend investigated a fatal shooting of a liquor store robber. The person who didn't realize what had happened gave a good description of what went on.
The person who saw and understood someone was shot, was very upset and gave a differing account which did not match the evidence.
Depending on your involvement, humans process things different. I have found that first hand violence is very swift and hard to understand, but watching it without the huge surge of adrenaline it is easier to recount usually.
There is a difference in training also, with someone who can prepare for the adrenaline dump, and make allowances for it by controlling breathing, etc. vs. someone who is overwhelmed.
Just be careful with eyewitness testimony, they don't mean to distort what they saw, it just happens sometimes.

Answer 2

Elizabeth Loftus (1974) did a lot of work on eyewitness testimony via several experiments to question the validity of eyewitness testimony. If you know this study (Loftus and Palmer's EWT Experiment) there are a lot of points to put forward that disagree with her theory. Here's some:

- Loftus and Palmer's 1974 experiment does not mean that all leading questions will lead to inaccurate testimony. Cohen (1993) argued that many errors occurred because participants were forced to give 'Yes' or 'No' answers (similar to police questioning today?). In real situations when open-ended questions are asked and witnesses can respond with 'I don't know, and 'not sure', testimony is more accurate.
- The Co-Existance Hypothesis: an alternative theory of EWT saying that both the original and the innaccurate versions of witnessed events are retained in the memory. Loftus was convinced that post-event info. and responses replaces the original info 'which cannot be recalled even if money is offered for accurate info'.
- McCloskey and Zaragoza (1985) also disagreed with Loftus as they showed that if participants are given misleading info. and are offered a choice of the original true info and alternatives, they tend to choose the original.

Hope it's relevant and it helps!

Answer 3

Eyewitness testimony is generally thought to be unreliable but this article mentions one case that is supposedly an example of a success story http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A13199862

Answer 4

haven't a clue what you mean but i do know that i've been at the scene of a really bad accident and my brother and i both standing there, saw the whole thing but when it came time to tell the officers , we gave different stories. we did not see the accident equally.
same goes for anything in life we see something and we believe something but our reality is only a perception .
truth is always something else