User:Legitimus/Suggestive question

A suggestive question is one that implies that a certain answer should be given in response, or falsely presents a presupposition in the question as accepted fact. Such a question "tricks" the person into answering a specific way that may or may not be true or consistent with their actual feelings, and can be deliberate or unintentional. For example, the phrasing "Don't you think this was wrong?" is more suggestive that "Do you think think this was wrong?" despite the difference of only one word. The former may subtly pressure the respondent into responding "yes," whereas the latter is far more direct.

Many of the early studies of memory (e.g. Bartlett 1932) demonstrate how memories are not always accurate records of our experiences. It seems that we try to fit past events into our existing representations of the world, making the memory more coherent or make more sense for us. For example a schema is a picture we carry in our minds to describe a certain environment. If you were asked to describe a restaurant, you would think of tables, chairs, plates, etc. Because of this, it is possible for people to ask a suggestive question to try and manipulate our memory, and thus reinforce their case. For example if you showed a person a picture of a child's room that contained no teddy bear, and then asked them, "Did you see a teddy bear?" you are not implying that there was one in the room and the person is free to answer. However if you ask, "Did you see the teddy bear?" it implies that one was in the room and the person is more likely to answer "yes", as the presence of a teddy bear is consistent with that person's schema of a child's room.

Experimental research by psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has established that trying to answer such questions can create confabulation in eyewitnesses. For example, participants in an experiment may all view the same video clip of a car crash. Participants are assigned at random in one of two groups. The participants in the first group are asked "How fast was the car moving when it passed by the stop sign?" The participants in the other group are asked a similar question that does not refer to a stop sign. Later, the participants from the first group are more likely to remember seeing a stop sign in the video clip, even though there was in fact no such sign. Such findings have been replicated and raise serious questions about the validity of information elicited through poorly phrased questions during eyewitness testimony.