Psychology

In psychology we talked about child witnesses in different criminal trials. It was commonly thought that children would never lie, they're too inocent. However, researchers have discovered that children are extremely susceptible to persuasion. When being questioned in a crimial trial, children are asked highly leading questions by the investigators. The use of leading quesions over a period of time causes the child to create a story around these quesitions, and believe the invented story actually happened. The children don't think they're lying, they truely believe that the story they have created actually happened in real life. Many children studied added details to their stories that were never brought up by the interviewer. A similar study was also done without using leading questions, but by simply asking one question every week for ten weeks. Before the end of the ten weeks, the kids had believed that this quesiton was something that had actually happend to them. For example, one of the questions was: have you ever gotten your finger stuck in a mouse trap and had to go to the hospital? One boy told this story with great detail including how it happened, where it happened, who went to the hospital with him.