Eyewitness accounts of females and males.

In two experiments, college students looked at a series of slides depicting a wallet snatching (Experiment 1) or a fight (Experiment 2) and then took a multiple-choice test of accuracy for the details of that incident. One day later, they read a version of the incident that for some of them contained misleading information about certain objects in the scene. Finally, a test was administered to measure the extent to which the misleading information was incorporated into the subject's recollections. The major results of interest concerned sex differences: Women were more accurate and more resistant to suggestion about female-oriented details, whereas men were more accurate and resistant to suggestion about male-oriented details. This result is related to the general tendency for accuracy on a specific item to lead to an improved ability to resist a suggestion about that specific item. Additional analyses indicated that overall accuracy was neither related to intelligence (as measured by a college entrance test) nor to specific abilities, such as verbal or spatial ability.