Reading Comprehension

PT121 · S2 · P4 · Q27 Leading Questions

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Leading questions—questions worded in such a way as to suggest a particular answer—can yield unreliable testimony either by design, as when a lawyer tries to trick a witness into affirming a particular version of the evidence of a case, or by accident, when a questioner unintentionally prejudices the witness’s response.

Topic

Leading questions

Framework

Problem / Solution, or Old / New

The passage is primarily about the Problem of leading questions, but there isn't a Solution discussed.

And the passage is primarily about our New, better understanding of the danger of leading questions, but there's not much time spent on our Old mindset of knowing-less about leading questions / not seeing them as problematic.

Main Point

NEW/PROBLEM Recent studies are making us more aware of some problematic aspects of leading questions and of the underlying conditions that give rise to these problems.

Summary

P1 - Intro to Topic, Pivot into Problem

The author introduces us to leading questions and establishes that while leading question re a known problem in the courtroom (which is why judges may disallow them), they are a less-appreciated problem outside the courtroom. The "But" in the middle of this paragraph is one of those classic Author Pivot moments that pulls into focus the foreground of what we'll be discussing.

P2 - New research findings on leading questions

This paragraph presents our emerging understanding from new research, about how leading questions asked pre-courtroom could still bias witness testimony. Our memories have fuzzy details and incomplete details, and new information contained in a leading question that doesn't conflict with our memory will basically be absorbed into our memory. An example is provided in which an eyewitness comes to have a belief about a stop sign via a leading question.

The first sentence of this paragraph has the famous Author Pivot word of "Recent", and this sentence ultimately seems like our closest thing to a Main Point sentence.

P3 - Further implications of New research

This paragraph just continues to flesh out the research findings. It emphasizes that those fuzzy details are usually things that are distant in time and weren't super germane to the original memory. Since we're most likely to be misled by leading questions when it comes to tangential details like someone's shoes, or car, or hair, etc. the fact that many eyewitnesses are relied upon to give identifying testimony regarding small details like that highlights the danger of how leading questions could have important ramifications.

27.

Which one of the following can be most reasonably inferred from the information in the passage?

The tendency of leading questions
Too Strong: no correlation
The concept of how emotional states affect vulnerability to leading questions is never discussed. We'd have to find explicit support for a strong idea like "X has no correlation with Y".
2% picked this
Leading questions asked in the
Unknown Comparison: inside/outside
The first paragraph is making it seem like, "We already know it's a problem in the courtroom; that's why we disallow it. But it's also a problem when done outside the courtroom." That's the only comparison ever made. The author doesn't otherwise suggest that leading questions are more likely to have a warping effect if they're done outside vs. inside the courtroom.
4% picked this
The memory processes by which
Too Strong / Contradicted: not relevant
The "Moreover" sentence in the middle of the 2nd paragraph says that "we tend to process new data similarly whether they correspond to details as we remember them, or to gaps in those details". Obviously if a leading question reinforces an accurate detail we already remembered, it won't have any pernicious effect on our testimony. But this question stem is saying "the memory processes at work are not relevant to explaining leading questions" and those memory processes at work are relevant --- they are the same process that leads us to add in a new fact from a leading question if there was a gap in our memory.
4% picked this
Correct
The risk of testimony being
Why this is right
This answer sounds impenetrably confusing at first. Because it has a "as X increases, Y increases" volume dial type formulation, we can scan the passage looking for something that has a similar "the more this, the more that" type relationship. The first sentence of the final paragraph puts three things into a volume dial connection: the farther removed you are from the event, the more likely your memory is vague/incomplete, the more vulnerable you are to leading questions. So this answer is saying "when you're more vulnerable to the effects of leading questions, that means that your memory is also more vague/incomplete", and that latter trait (a vague/incomplete memory) is "certain other factors that can increase the risk of testimony being inaccurate". In other words, if the first sentence of the last paragraph is saying, the more X, the more Y, the more Z then this answer is saying something like Y tends to increase as Z increases.
Skill tested: Inference · how this choice captures the passage's function is the move to repeat next time.
74% picked this
The traditional grounds on which
Opposite
If anything, the recent research reinforces that we are vulnerable to the effects of leading questions and underscores the need to disallow them in the courtroom.
15% picked this

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