They interviewed real witnesses of a real crime – people who had witnessed a gun shooting. A thief entered a gun shop, tied up the owner and stole money and guns. The owner freed himself and picked up a revolver. He went outside to get the registration number of the car but the thief wasn’t in his car and fired 2 shots at the owner. The owner then shot the thief 6 times and killed him.
Aims
To record an evaluate witness accounts, examining issues raised by laboratory research and to look at the accuracy and kind of errors made in witness accounts. They also wanted to compare interviews that had been carried out by a police officer.
Procedures
21 witnesses were interviewed after the incident. 20 of them were contacted and 13 agreed to take part in the researcher – 2 had moved away, 5 didn’t want to take part and 1 was the victim who didn’t want to relive the trauma.
Pps had been asked to describe the event in their own words and then police officer had a series of questions to amplify what had been said. 4 or 5 months later the 13 pps were interviewed (recorded then transcribed). They gave an account and then answered questions.
They were asked 2 misleading questions:
- A busted headlight or THE busted headlight
- THE yellow quarter panel or A yellow quarter panel (it was actually blue)
They were also asked about the degree of stress witness experienced at the time on a 7 point scale and were asked about their emotional state both before and after.
Yuille and Cutshall used a careful scoring procedure to compare details from research interviews with those from police interviews and what actually happened. They were divided into action details and description details.
Results
There were 7 central witnessed and 6 peripheral witnesses but both groups were equally accurate – 84% for the central witnesses and 79% of the peripheral witnesses (in terms of details they saw)
Misleading information had little effect – 10/13 said there was no broken headlight or yellow quarter panel, or said that they hadn’t seen the detail.
Conclusions
Eyewitnesses are not as inaccurate as lab experiments suggest – most were very accurate!
Efforts to mislead didn’t succeed which goes against lab findings – stress doesn’t affect ability to recall because witnesses felt less stress and more adrenaline