User talk:Samjcummins

I am incredibly excited to work with you on this project. I fully expect for us to do very well and dominate in some form or fashion. Jessicalamb (talk) 05:42, 7 September 2012 (UTC)

Our goal is to almost completely rewrite the entire article to make it more reader friendly. We want to use legal cases, psychology research, and other reliable sources to enhance the validitiy of this article. Currently, the two sections are “Epistemological Aspects” and “Findings from History” with a brief introduction preceding those. Instead, we plan on having a more descriptive introduction, defining eyewitness testimony, and outlining major critiques regarding the reliability of eyewitness testimony. We want to outline the article as follows:

1) Intro
 * -Here, we want to simply define what eyewitness testimony is and explain that research shows how it can be unreliable.

2) Legal Use
 * -We would explain how prosecutors use this testimony to appeal to jury, and cite studies showing the bias effect it can lead to with juries.

3) Wrongful Convictions
 * -In this section, we would discuss the many cases where the eyewitness testimony turned out to be false or misunderstood. We would also cite statistics from the Innocence Project regarding false convictions

4) History of Research and Recent Research
 * -Traditional View would be a subheading. It would reformat some of the information already provided in the article as a discussion on early opinion and research regarding eyewitness testimony
 * -Current View would be another subheading. It would focus on current studies on why eyewitness testimony proves to be inaccurate. This section would lean heavily on Loftus and her research.

5) Cognitive Errors that Occur
 * - If necessary, this section would elaborate on any applicable cognitive processes that explain the inaccuracy of eyewitness testimony that were not covered in the preceding section

6) Evaluating eyewitness testimony
 * -Information already in the article and from others sources about how to use eyewitness testimony effectively and how to accurately evaluate eyewitness testimony will be discussed in this section.

I would suggest rearranging it a bit. For instance, I would move up the research section early in the article as well as the cognitive errors that occur. Then I would talk about legal use and wrongful convictions. Legal use is the application and wrongful conviction is more like a warning about the limitations. If you talk about those things before you talk about the research and what the errors are, it's not going to make as much sense. Dguyla (talk) 12:50, 2 October 2012 (UTC)