Hi folks. In the past when I go over the eye witness testimony effect in
my Intro. To Psych. classes I have used a video clip of a car accident
with cars going at moderate speeds before getting into a fender-bender.
Today, just before class, I was checking to ensure that my PowerPoint
slides were all in order and that the clip would work, but it didn't.
The file seems to have become corrupted and so I ended up rushing to
Youtube and selecting a car crash with one of the vehicles going at a
considerably higher speed of about 55 mph:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=9zgq4oRVKfw.
The way I do the demonstration is by handing students a sheet of paper
with half of them getting the "smash" question while the other half get
"contact" question (e.g., how fast was the pick-up truck going when it
came into contact with the car). In the past I have obtained a moderate
effect usually going in the expected direction ("smashed" questions get
somewhat higher speed estimates). However, with the new video clip, I
was disappointed to find the exact opposite effect in my first section
of the class (I teach two sections of Intro.). The data turned out to be
highly variable but suggested an effect contrary to expectation. I
dismissed that incident as perhaps the result of disinterested students
just carelessly throwing some speed estimates around without much
reflection about what they had just watched. Surprisingly, the same
pattern with even more uniformed data occurred in my second class with
roughly 10 data point for each question.
I have not reviewed this literature in a while and so I wonder whether
any there are published data indicating, for example, that the speed of
the cars moderates the effect. Perhaps there are other factors operating
here that I am not aware of. Also, I realize that my data outcomes may
all be a big fluke, but I am a little befuddled by the students'
reports, particularly those in the second class. One other possibility I
thought of was that perhaps my students are reading the textbook before
class and simply wanted to have some fun with me, but based on other
class interactions, it was clear to me that this were routine classes:
Most of the students are simply not in the habit of reading the material
before I cover it in class. Any ideas as to what might be going on?
TIA
Miguel
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