Discussion:
The experiment described earlier was conducted almost as a replica of Loftus and Palmer’s (1974) car crash experiment . Some significant changes were made: as the number of groups was reduced to two, Loftus and Palmer’s experiment was conducted using five groups , also only two, instead of fiver, verbs were used (IV), giving less chance to observe significant differences between the data; the participants were not asked to write an account of the traffic accident , which might’ve altered the way the participants embedded the information in their memory.
Significant limitations must be taken in consideration which might’ve had great effect on the data collected. Some participants were under the age of 18 and were not holders of a driver’s license , which would give them a disadvantage with estimating the speed of a car in motion. Also the students in the groups were from the same class and would have daily contact with each other, which gives them a chance to discuss the answers, video and the question, and could have changed their perspective and memory of the accident. The students were not native English speakers and therefore might not have as much understanding of the difference in the wording of the question which would lead the answer to be based only on the video showed and the question wouldn’t affect the follow up question either .
This experiment was carried out to find the correlation between the wording of the questions asked to the participants and the answers given . Mann-Whitney U test was carried out to find whether or not there was a significant difference between the data collected from both groups. The test results showed that no significant difference was found and therefore the experiment failed to reach the requirements that would allow to accept the experimental hypothesis and the null hypothesis was accepted.
In conclusion, the experiment carried out in class did not show any potential to reflecting any theories mentioned earlier or any potential correlation between the wording of a question and the answer, furthermore the experiment doesn’t show any approval as to whether or not memory is being affected by the question asked.
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