Why Children’s Suggestibility Remains a Serious Concern

Amye R. Warren (*) Dorothy F. Marsil (**) I INTRODUCTION After more than two decades of continuous contemporary research on the child as a witness in legal proceedings, a great deal is known about children's eyewitness memory and suggestibility. Excellent reviews of this research are available, (1) and their summaries and conclusions will not be reiterated here. Instead, this article will focus on six areas representing some of the most intractable problems that will require further attention from scientists and practitioners alike. This list of issues is selective and somewhat idiosyncratic, but should serve to illustrate why the current understanding of children's suggestibility is far from complete. Research on each issue will be highlighted, concentrating primarily on studies published or presented in the past ten years. II Six REMAINING ISSUES A. Suggestibility is Not Limited to Preschool Children In the past ten years, research on children's capacities as witnesses has focused heavily on preschoolers, (2) who are disproportionately susceptible to suggestion. (3) The focus on preschoolers was based on both applied and theoretical grounds. For example, investigations in the McMartin Preschool case (4) and State v. Michaels (5) featured particularly problematic interviews with large numbers of very young children in day-care settings. Knowledge of cognitive development principles led child witness researchers to predict that preschoolers' relative cognitive limitations could lead to greater susceptibility to suggestive influences and, in turn, to a variety of problems for their interviewers. For example, Nancy Perry and her colleagues demonstrated that preschoolers have difficulty determining whether they really understand complex questions and frequently inaccurately answer questions that they do not understand. (6) Although the research attention devoted to preschoolers was certainly warranted, it has led to a relative neglect of the equally important population of older children. This trend, however, appears to be changing. In recent studies, researchers are increasingly including older children. (7) The findings indicate that suggestibility generally declines over the school years but that even adolescents can be significantly more suggestible than adults. (8) On the other hand, some studies demonstrate that, under certain conditions, older children and adults can be more suggestible than younger children. (9) The following sections briefly review six studies that included children older than preschoolers. Jennifer Ackil and Maria Zaragoza examined the suggestibility of first graders, third graders, fifth graders, and college students. (10) The subjects viewed a brief video and then heard an experimenter read a summary of the video that included some misleading information. (11) Either immediately afterwards or one week later, participants were given memory tests. (12) Evidence of suggestibility was found for all age groups, but first graders were more susceptible to suggestion than third and fifth graders, who were in turn more susceptible to suggestion than college students. (13) Essentially, the same pattern of age differences was found in the proportion of the suggested items that participants claimed to have actually seen in the video, as opposed to remembering from the summary. (14) Julie Robinson and Pamela Briggs also showed a film to their participants, who were four- to five-year-olds, eight- to nine-year-olds, and adults. (15) They then asked a series of questions, some of which were misleading. (16) A day later, they asked another set of questions. (17) In terms of correct answers to misleading questions, the youngest children's performance was poorer than that of eight- to nine-year-olds and adults. The latter two groups, however, did not significantly differ. (18) In contrast, when suggested answers to misleading questions were examined separately, the study showed that both age groups of children were more suggestible than adults, but that the children did not differ from one another. …