Eyewitness Testimony

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The testimony of an eyewitness takes a huge part in the justice system in the whole world. With the use of these testimonies, tracing the events of what happened will provide great help. However, psychologists have questioned and continued to study such testimonies’ accuracy (McBride et al., 2018). Below are two articles that provide information about eyewitness testimonies and their reliability.
In the study of Shapira & Pansky (2019), they determined the precision of eyewitnesses’ statements using metacognition. Factors of monitoring and control are provided as a significant determinant in testing the study’s two hypotheses. The study’s first hypothesis is false memory persistence, which indicates that some memory of an individual is remembered in incorrect details. On the other hand, the second hypothesis is about when individuals answer questions about memory and is unwilling to say that they do not know the answers. Two experiments were done in the study, and they used two ways to motivate them: providing them money (Experiment 1) or proper instructions (Experiment 2). Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 both used sixty students of the University of Haifa who speak Hebrew as its respondents and are group into three groups for the 24 hours and 48 hours interval. During the experiments, the respondents were exposed to a slide show and are tasked to answer questions about it after using Raven’s Progressive Matrices. The first group was immediately questioned after the viewing, while the second group was asked after 24 hours, and the remaining twenty more were asked after 48 hours. With the use of the Quantity-Accuracy Profile, cognitive and metacognitive determinants were separated and are analyzed. In the results, Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 were almost identical as it was showed that the precision of memory of the respondents decreases over time, specifically after 48 hours. This result was stated that it was due to inadequate monitoring, and it is likely for an eyewitness to produce a less accurate testimony after 48 hours because of the change in the metacognitive process.
While the study of Loftus (2019) focuses her discussion by using studies and related researchers about eyewitness testimonies, in her study, she specified her two works under Applied Cognitive Psychology where she explained events such as the robbery and the plane crash that are connected to the eyewitness testimonies. Afterward, she then argued that testimonies could be changed with the factor of misinformation. With misinformation, individuals who are confident of information and were provided with wrong information tend to accept and use the latest piece of information. She also stated that some studies connect the confidence of eyewitnesses to the accuracy of their testimonies. Although not all of the stated research was determined to provide a correlation ...