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How does leading eyewitness statements influence and shift attributions of blame after incidents? This upcoming study explored this question.

Participants watched a video of an incident between two people and read eyewitness statements that either blamed somebody for the incident or blamed nobody.

A key intention was to study if blame conformity occurred in response to leading eyewitness statements. Blame conformity is where somebody will align their own attributions of blame to align with the co-witness.

They also explored the phenomenon of post-event information (PEI), and co-witness PEI. Post-event information is where people are exposed to other information and witness statements after the fact, which then alters their own understanding and recollection of the event.

Key findings were that:

• Blame conformity was demonstrated in this sample, where blame for an accident can be shifted between individuals as a result of a leading eyewitness statement
• They found that over 1/3 of participants who read an eyewitness statement blaming an individual for an accident “subsequently blamed the same person for its occurrence”
• Conversely, less than 4% of participants who read a non-leading eyewitness statement with no blame subsequently attributed blame to an individual
• A 1 week delay between watching the video and attributing the cause didn’t affect the results

They say that these findings have important legal implications. For instance, multiple eyewitnesses are known to frequently discuss the event they have witnessed, or have shifts in memory recollection, or as this study has shown, blame conformity.

I think we can also imagine implications for workplace investigations.

Authors: Thorley, C., & Rushton‐Woods, J. (2013). Blame conformity: Leading eyewitness statements can influence attributions of blame for an accident. Applied cognitive psychology, 27(3), 291-296.

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Study link: https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.2906

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