Misinformation Effects and the Suggestibility of Eyewitness Memory.

Social scientists and legal practitioners have long suspected that suggestive forensic interview practices are a major cause of inaccuracies in eyewitness testimony. However, it wasn’t until Elizabeth Loftus published a highly influential series of studies on eyewitness suggestibility in the 1970s that a systematic body of scientific literature on this topic started to emerge. Since then, hundreds of empirical studies on eyewitness suggestibility have been published, all of them variants of the basic experimental paradigm that Loftus developed. In the early 1970s, research and theorizing about memory was based almost exclusively on studies of memory for lists of words or sentences (see, e.g., Crowder, 1976). By studying memory for complex, fast-moving, and forensically relevant events (typically depicted in film clips or slide shows), Loftus demonstrated that it was possible to conduct well-controlled experiments that were high in ecological validity (Banaji & Crowder, 1989). Her studies provided clear evidence that suggestive interviews can lead to profound errors in eyewitness testimony, thus raising serious questions about the reliability of memory and eyewitness testimony. Her work established that scientific research on memory and suggestibility can and should inform the courts. In addition, her findings inspired many theoretical