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You have to study at least one key issue for each approach to psychology
This is an important issue because of the number of cases where people are found guilty of crimes with no other
evidence except for eyewitness testimonies.
An eyewitness is a witness to a crime, who must give their account of the event, and possibly identify the criminal
from an identity parade or appear in court. This can lead to a conviction, so if the eyewitness testimony is wrong,
someone has been wrongly convicted of a crime they did not commit.
Elizabeth Loftus is a leading expert in the area and has done a lot of research into the reliability of eyewitness
testimonies. She has identified many useful factors. For example, eyewitnesses can be swayed by identity parades
(this is likely to be because they want to help so feel they must answer, or might assume that the criminal has to be
in the line-up). They will be looking to find the nearest match to the person they saw, not the actual person: this can
lead to wrongful convictions. For example, if the eyewitness saw a black person commit a crime, and the line-up
consisted of five white men and one black man, the black man may be chosen as guilty.
A real-life example is that of Bobby Joe Leaster. In 1970, he was picked up by the police for murdering a shop-owner
and was taken to the shop, where the deceased’s wife identified him as the murderer from the back of the police
car. He was sentenced to life in prison. In 1986, after Leaster has spent sixteen years in imprisonment, the bullet of
the victim was matched to a gun linked to two robbers of the time of the murder. Leaster was released, after
spending 16 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. After an analysis of 69 cases of wrongful conviction, it
was found that 29 of them (42%) were due to mistaken identity from eyewitnesses.
Application of concepts and ideas:
 Bartlett (1932) discussed the idea that memory is not like a tape recorder, how schemata affect remembering
 Loftus and Ketcham (1991) found that innocent individuals were wrongly convicted 45% of the time by
eyewitness testimonies from the police cases they studied
 Chartier (1977) suggests that an eyewitness’ memory of the events will be vague, and so will try to fill in the
gaps to make it make more sense to them, which goes with the theory of memory being reconstructive
The term flashbulb memory refers to when the memory of an event is so powerful, it is as though the memory is a
photograph which the person can relive to such detail long after the event has taken place. Researchers use the
phrase “now print” to explain these memories, because it was as if the whole episode was a snapshot and imprinted
in memory as such.
Features of flashbulb memories are that they are vivid and can potentially last for the person’s entire lifetime. They
tend to be about events which bare emotional significance, for example, Diana’s crash or 9/11 would be
remembered as flashbulb memories.
Researchers would like to explain how flashbulb memories are stored, partly because this is of interest, but also
partly to see if this helps to explain how we remember. This issue is what leads to “flashbulb” memories and how
they can be explained.
Application of concepts and ideas:
 Brown and Kulik (1977) described the idea of flashbulb memory and pointed out that such memories are
special and long-lasting; they also found that 75% of black people who were asked about the assassination of
Martin Luther King could recall it, compared to only 33% of white people
 Colgrove (1899) found that most people could remember precisely what they were doing when Lincoln was
assassinated
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