Schema Theory and Verbal Altercations IB HL Psycho

Schema Theory and Verbal Altercations IB Candidate Code: IB Candidate Code for Group: 3,474 Words Schema Theory and Verbal Altercations !2 Contents Introduction Page 3 Exploration Page 4 Results/Analysis Page 7 Evaluation Page 9 References Page 12 Appendices Page 13 Schema Theory and Verbal Altercations !3 Introduction In psychology, researchers design and replicate psychological experiments in order to establish an understanding for people and the way that our brains function. For my Internal Assessment, my group and I chose to replicate the Loftus and Palmer (1974) experiment. This study focus on the cognitive approach to psychology that studies the correlation between language and memory and how reliable memory is. Loftus and Palmer predicted that “modifying the wording of questions after an event will influence the accuracy of memory of a witness for that event.” In the Loftus and Palmer experiment, the researchers divided their sample of 150 participants into three groups. All of the participants watched a video of a multiple-car crash, and were then asked questions concerning the video. The important question that the participants were asked was “How fast were the cars going when they hit each other?” The control group was not asked to provide these estimations. However, for the third group, the verb “hit” was changed to “smashed” when the question was proposed. The conclusions of this original experiment were that the estimates of the car speeds were moderated by the verb that they used to describe the caraccident. If the word connoted a higher intensity, such as “smashed,” the speed was estimated to be greater during the crash. This indicates that questions can alter the memories of events and cause distortions. If there is bias between two sources concerning an event, it can create memory distortions and lead to false interpretations. The aim of our research was to determine how changing the description of an event can influence an individual’s perception of that event given their cognitive schema. The reason that we decided to conduct further research on this experiment is because we were interested in the role of biases on different events, and how a singular word that connotes a certain idea can trigger your brain to believe something different