Investigating the effects of age and gender on cowitness suggestibility during blame attribution

Abstract

Despite a large body of research investigating the effects of age and gender on eyewitness suggestibility, the majority of studies has focussed on the impressionability of participants when attempting to recall the presence of items from an event. Very little research has attempted to investigate the effects of age and gender on the suggestibility of eyewitnesses when attempting to attribute blame. Participants (N = 268) viewed and discussed a crime (video) with cowitnesses before giving individual statements. Confederates were used to expose the participants to misinformation during the discussion, suggesting that the wrong bystander was responsible for the offence. Findings indicated that participants who encountered the misinformation were more likely to make a false blame attribution and were more confident in their erroneous judgements. The results found no significant age‐ or gender‐related differences in blame conformity rates; however, male eyewitnesses showed greater levels of overconfidence in their false responses than female participants, after encountering cowitness misinformation.

An examination of stigmatising attributions about mental illness amongst police custody staff

“…This means training such as Mental Health First Aid Training can be utilised across forces in order to address any stigmatising attitudes and also meet the needs of the custody staff. Given the strong emphasis on improving current interviewing procedures (Gibert & Mojtahedi, 2018;Mojtahedi, Ioannou, & Hammond, 2019;Mojtahedi, Ioannou, & Hammond, 2018a;Mojtahedi, Ioannou, & Hammond, 2018b;Mojtahedi, Ioannou, & Hammond, 2017a;Mojtahedi, Ioannou, & Hammond, 2017b ), a fruitful direction for future research, currently being pursued by the current authors, is to explore the effects of stigmatising attributions on police officers' approaches to interviewing witnesses experiencing mental ill health.…”

Motivations for adolescent offending and truancy from school: retrospective interviews with adults recently released from a custodial prison sentence in England

“…Psychological research is routinely providing practical knowledge around the management and prevention of crime (e.g., Wainwright and Mojtahedi, 2020 : Willmott et al., 2021 ; Mojtahedi et al., 2018 , 2019 ) and the present study follows suit. Despite the adoption of an alternative study design and method by which factors contributing adolescent truancy and offending can be assessed, the study findings obtained here support conclusions drawn in a wealth of past research surrounding factors which contribute to such juvenile behaviours.…”

Intelligence, Authority and Blame Conformity: Co-witness Influence Is Moderated by the Perceived Competence of the Information Source

“…The manifestation of a co-witness discussion can create significant problems for investigators by creating an environment where eyewitnesses are at risk of being misled by their co-witnesses into reporting inaccurate information within their statements-a process commonly known as memory conformity Tousignant et al 1986;Wright et al 2000). This phenomenon has been extensively researched, with a consensus that exposure to misinformation during a PED can have negative effects on the memory recollection of eyewitnesses (Carlucci et al 2010;Gabbert et al 2004;Garry et al 2008;Mojtahedi et al 2017a;Mojtahedi et al 2019;Paterson and Kemp 2006). Perhaps one of the most adverse consequences of a co-witness discussion is the possibility for memory conformity to occur when the witness is later attempting to attribute blame (Mojtahedi et al 2017b;Mojtahedi et al 2018a;Mojtahedi et al 2018b;Thorley 2015;Thorley and Rushton-Woods 2013).…”