SkepticThinker
Veteran Member
Eyewitness testimony is often unreliable - this is a well known phenomenon. Memories aren't just an objective snapshot of some event that a person has witnessed. Memories of events are filtered through our own perceptions, biases and feelings at the time (and afterward). The freaky part is, it's not all that difficult to create false memories in a person's mind, either intentionally or unintentionally.Yeah, we don't need any eyewitnesses at all since we have all of this technology.
Might as well rewrite all of the investigation books, we can simply throw all eyewitness testimony out since it is all so unreliable.
"Many researchers have created false memories in normal individuals; what is more, many of these subjects are certain that the memories are real. In one well-known study, Loftus and her colleague Jacqueline Pickrell gave subjects written accounts of four events, three of which they had actually experienced. The fourth story was fiction; it centered on the subject being lost in a mall or another public place when he or she was between four and six years old. A relative provided realistic details for the false story, such as a description of the mall at which the subject’s parents shopped. After reading each story, subjects were asked to write down what else they remembered about the incident or to indicate that they did not remember it at all. Remarkably about one third of the subjects reported partially or fully remembering the false event. In two follow-up interviews, 25 percent still claimed that they remembered the untrue story, a figure consistent with the findings of similar studies."
Why Science Tells Us Not to Rely on Eyewitness Accounts
"Experiments conducted by Barbara Tversky and Elizabeth Marsh corroborate the vulnerability of human memory to bias.7 In one group of studies, participants were given the "Roommate Story," a description of incidents involving his or her two fictitious roommates. The incidents were categorized as annoying, neutral, or socially "cool." Later, participants were asked to neutrally recount the incidents with one roommate, to write a letter of recommendation for one roommate’s application to a fraternity or sorority, or to write a letter to the office of student housing requesting the removal of one of the roommates. When later asked to recount the original story, participants who had written biased letters recalled more of the annoying or "cool" incidents associated with their letters. They also included more elaborations consistent with their bias. These participants made judgements based upon the annoying or social events they discussed in their letters. Neutral participants made few elaborations, and they also made fewer errors in their retelling, such as attributing events to the wrong roommate. The study also showed that participants writing biased letters recalled more biased information for the character they wrote about, whereas the other roommate was viewed neutrally.
Memory is affected by retelling, and we rarely tell a story in a neutral fashion. By tailoring our stories to our listeners, our bias distorts the very formation of memory—even without the introduction of misinformation by a third party. The protections of the judicial system against prosecutors and police "assisting" a witness’ memory may not sufficiently ensure the accuracy of those memories. Even though prosecutors refrain from "refreshing" witness A’s memory by showing her witness B’s testimony, the mere act of telling prosecutors what happened may bias and distort the witness’s memory. Eyewitness testimony, then, is innately suspect."
https://agora.stanford.edu/sjls/Issue One/fisher&tversky.htm
"As Loftus puts it, "just because someone says something confidently doesn't mean it's true." Jurors can't help but find an eyewitness’s confidence compelling, even though experiments have shown that a person's confidence in their own memory is sometimes undiminished even in the face of evidence that their memory of an event is false.
The procedures of a criminal investigation can even distort eyewitness recall. The classic example is the lineup: The witness is asked to pick out the perpetrator from a group of similar-looking people. But the police detectives who organize the lineup are usually the same ones who have identified or caught the prime suspect, making them invested in the eyewitness selecting their choice. "They can't help but drop little cues," Loftus says. A detective might smile, grunt, or nod approvingly when a suspect is chosen. "Witnesses pick up on it." More insidiously, police interrogators can unconsciously coach people into having false memories, a problem revealed in the 1990s in research by Loftus and others."
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/10/how-reliable-eyewitness-testimony-scientists-weigh
Weirdly enough, my sister and I just realized the other day that we have most likely been perpetuating a false memory we both seemed to share from our childhood that we realized we cannot corroborate in any way. And that's a shared memory (or so we thought
).
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