Loftus Leading Questions

In the article “Leading Questions and the Eyewitness Report” by Elizabeth Loftus, she set out to examine how the way questions were worded impacted responses to an event immediately after it was seen, and how it affected further questions regarding the same scene at a later date. By conducting four different experiments, she found that by adding what she called “presuppositions” to the initial questions she asked her subjects, it tended to cause a positive response to the question asked later about seeing the presupposition. With each experiment Loftus dug deeper into how these questions can interfere with your ability to remember an event accurately.
In experiment one, Loftus wanted to test the general idea that it could be possible to influence

This time 40 students watched a three-minute video regarding eight people disturbing a classroom. They students were then asked various questions about the demonstrations but the key question differed by asking whether the leader of the demonstration lead 4 or 12 people into the classroom. A week later, the students were asked new questions about the class disturbance but this time Loftus asked, “How many demonstrators did you see entering the classroom”? Loftus found that the students who got the initial question with twelve total demonstrators answered with a higher amount of demonstrators on average compared to the people who had the question that implied there were four total demonstrators. However, when you recalculate the data without the subjects who answered twelve given twelve demonstrators condition and four given four demonstrators condition, Loftus concluded that “recall of the specific number given in the initial questionnaire is not an adequate alternative explanation”(Loftus 1975: 566). This experiment proved that presenting the subjects with a misleading presupposition regarding numbers affected the subject’s response to what they had seen