The Influence of Context on the "Weapon Focus" Effect

Weapon focus is an interesting topic and is very relevant in eyewitness identification, occurring when a witness sees a weapon. Because of the weapon, the witness remembers less information about the identification of the perpetrator. Typically the witness focuses more on the weapon and places little attention on other details. The visibility of the weapon that the witness has seems to correlate with the description performance. The more easily a witness can see the weapon, the less likely the witness will remember information. Steblay has found similar results in many different experimental settings leading to the belief that the “weapon effect” is a consistent/reliable effect.
I found myself agreeing with Kramer and Loftus, because I believe that weapon focus occurs due to the witness’s attention focusing virtually on the weapon exclusively, leaving little attention to be on other aspects such as the appearance of the perpetrator. This makes sense to me since the weapon poses a threat and that fear causes people to pay more attention to it. Loftus and Kramer argue that the weapon effect occurs because the weapon is encoded very well but the other details are not. Therefore, the other details (such as appearance of the perpetrator) are much harder to recall.
In experiment #1, participants were shown a two minute video consisting of a women being approached by a man holding a gun. A couple of different versions of the video were shown in order to manipulate the unusual aspect of the gun. Witnesses were assigned to one of the four conditions. The first version took place in a baseball field which is a location where a gun is not to be expected. The second version took place at a shooting range, a location where guns are normally seen and therefore the gun is not out of context. The video tape also manipulated the threat level. In the high threat level, the man pointed the gun directly at the women. In the low threat level, the gun barrel was not directly at the girl but rather pointed at the ground.
After viewing the video, the witnesses filled out a form that tested their ability to remember information from the shown video, especially focusing on the appearance of the man who held the gun. Next the witnesses were asked to try to identify the man who held the gun in a target present lineup. The results should that the witnesses who saw the video of the gun in the baseball field setting performed worse on the memory recall test then did witnesses who saw the gunman at the shooting range location. It was also found that level of threat had no effect.

SD

Weapon focus is the idea that a visible weapon during the occurrence of a crime has a detrimental effect on witness description/identification of the individual holding the weapon. Pickel’s study covered in the article The Influence of Context on the "Weapon Focus" Effect looks at the effect of a weapon, as well as novel and expected items, on a witness’s description and identification. When the perpetrator carrying the weapon is expected to have a weapon (e.g. police) and are expected to carry that weapon in that context, then the weapon focus effect was not as pronounced in regards to description as when the perpetrator was not expected to be carrying a weapon (e.g. a priest) or while the context of the individual carrying the weapon was unexpected. There was no noted difference in identification accuracy. The second experiment addressed whether or not the weapon effect seen in experiment one was due to the weapon itself, or if it was more due to a stimulus they didn’t expect with the individual. To differentiate whether it was the threat of a weapon or just the surprise of an unexpected object that caused the decrease in description accuracy, those that administered the study had a weapon group and a phone group for the cop and the priest, along with a control. There was no difference in description scores in the police, whether they were carrying a gun or a phone, while priests carrying a gun showed a much lower description score than those that were carrying phones. This seems to support the hypothesis that the weapon focus effect seems to be more related to seeing an unusual stimulus rather than the focus on the threat of a weapon. Another part of the context was the perception of a threat, but it was found that the threat level of the suspects had no effect on the scores. Originally, I found Pickel’s selection of the phone odd, as it’s realistic for both priests and police to use a phone. I thought something more directly related to a priest or maybe a different profession whom you would more expect to be carrying a phone (like a broker) would be more applicable. But if I did see a priest carrying a phone, I guess I wouldn’t give it a second thought, so it was probably just fine.

SB