Child Witnesses Realism, By Carl Allwood, Par Granhag...

In the study â€Å"Child Witnesses’ Metamemory Realism† by, Carl Allwood, Pà ¤r Granhag and Anna-Carin Jonsson, the researchers all set out to examine the confidence of 11 to 12-year-olds when they had to answer questions after watching a brief kidnapping video. Children are often used as witnesses during a legal investigation and during the trial. Children are regularly asked how confident they are in their memories, and the jurors rely massively on the child’s certainty of their testimony. â€Å"Eyewitnesses are often mistaken, and previous research has concluded that a mistaken eyewitness’ testimony is the single largest cause of jury convictions of innocent people† (Allwood et al., 2006, p. 1). Allwood et al. hypothesized that children would be overconfident in their actions and have a much higher amount of confidence than adults. There were 81 children (41 girls and 40 boys), who were between the ages 11-12. The participant pool came from four schools, who were located in a middle-class area in Sweden. The children were randomly put into four different conditions, which were judgement scales. There was â€Å"the numeric scale (n = 20), the picture scale (n = 22), the line scale (n = 20) and the written scale (n = 19)† (Allwood et al., 2006, p. 4). The children exhibited overconfidence in all four of the conditions. When the children’s results were compared to the results of adults, overconfidence by children was also shown to be significantly higher than that of adults (d =