OCR AS Psychology: Core Studies - Loftus and Palmer (4)

Experiment 2: The 2nd experiment was conducted to provide additional insights into why the participants in the differing conditions gave different speed estimates. They wanted to know id the participant's memories really had been distorted/altered by the verb.

A similar procedure was used to the 1st experiment whereby 150 student participants (from Uni of Washington) viewed a short (1 min) clip which contained a 4 second scene of a multiple car accident, and were then questioned about it. In this 2nd experiment there were 3 conditions and the IV was again maninpulated by the way the question was worded.

• Condition 1: 50 participants asked "How fast were the cars going when the hit each other?
• Condition 2: 50 participants asked "How fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?
• Condition 3: 50 participants weren't asked about the speed of the vehicels (control group)

1 week later, participants returned and without vieiwing the film again, they answered a series of questions about the accident. The critical question was "Did you see any broken glass?" The critical question was part of a longer series of questions and was plaed in a random position on the participant's question paper. The DV was whether or not participants had seen broken glass or not. THERE WAS IN FACT NO BROKEN GLASS!!