The accident witness
Watch the scene carefully: two cars are about to meet. Then answer the questions from memory.
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Try the experiment: your result will appear here, next to what most people do.
What just happened (read it after the experiment)
What most people do: With the word “smashed,” witnesses estimated the speed at 41 mph on average, versus 32 mph with “contacted.”
In 1974, Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer showed people a film of an accident, then asked how fast the cars were going when they “contacted” or “smashed into” each other. With “smashed,” the estimates went up.
A week later, a third of the “smashed” witnesses remembered broken glass. There wasn’t any.
A question can rewrite a memory. Investigators have learned this: they now avoid questions that suggest the answer.
More experiments
Sources
- Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer, “Reconstruction of automobile destruction,” Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1974.