I'm Positive It Was Him!
By Dariyan Adams
“Seeing is believing” is a commonly used phrase that reflects the idea that often people need to see something before they can accept that it truly has occurred. But how would you feel knowing that your memory of something you think you saw can play tricks on you? Most people believe that our memories record experiences and events like a video camera. Our memories then create stories that are based on these experiences. In reality, these stories can be extremely accurate, but other times they can be completely fictional. When memories have “holes” personal experiences along with other people’s testimonies can influence how they get filled in. As a result, this leaves individuals completely unaware of the difference. This may not seem like that big of a deal, and to most people it isn’t. But what about innocent people in jail because of false eyewitness testimonies? How would you feel if you were convicted of a crime that you didn’t commit because of a false testimony? For people who are in jail under these circumstances, false memories have destroyed their entire lives.
It is commonly believed that eyewitness testimony is one of the best kinds of evidence. People question, how could someone misremember an event that happened right before their own eyes? The Innocence Project is a nonprofit legal organization that is committed to exonerating wrongly convicted individuals. This includes individuals who are in jail because they were wrongly convicted based off of a false eyewitness testimony. According to this organization, 358 people who have been convicted and sentenced to death have been proven innocent since 1989. Out of these 358 individuals, 71% or 255 people have been convicted through eyewitness misidentification and have served and average of 14 years in prison.
After hearing these statistics, you may be wondering, why do so many eyewitnesses misremember events and testify under oath if what they are saying is false? Most eyewitnesses have partial information, and instead of committing what we do know to memory, our brains attempt to create a coherent picture that makes sense—creating a false memory. For example, let’s say that you were at a gas station and as you were sitting in your car you see a man run out of the station. Minutes later cops arrive, and you find out that there has been a crime committed. While you’re waiting to talk to the cops you hear other witnesses testify that there was a gun shot. Your brain may fill in the sound of a gunshot based on other testimonies.
During this process people can forget where the source of information originally came from. This process is called source confusion. An example of source confusion would be, your mom confirming a story that didn’t actually happen. An individual is more likely to confess to an event that may have never happened, or that they don’t remember happening, because of their mother’s testimony. This is how false memories are implanted (Takarangi et al, 2013). An experiment that was conducted in 1995 showed that false memories can be planted. This experiment was carried out by a memory expert named Elizabeth Loftus, a distinguished professor at the University of California. The experiment, known as the Lost In The Mall study, consisted of 24 participants who were presented with four stories from when they were between 4 and 6 years old, three of which were true, and one false (Loftus, 1999). The events were chosen so that they were not traumatic nor emotionally difficult to recall. Each participant’s family was asked to provide the circumstances of another event that could possibly have happened in their lives but did not actually occur. In each case, the false story told to the participants was about them getting lost in a shopping mall as a child. Relatives of the participants provided details of a specific shopping mall the false memory could have taken place in, along with other details to make the fake story more plausible. The participants were first sent a written copy of the four events and asked to explain which events were true and which were false. Shortly after this, the participants were asked to come in for an interview. They were reminded about the four different stories and asked to recall as much as they could about each one. At the end of the interview process, participants rated the clarity of their memories. At this time, it was revealed to the participants that one of the memories was false. Five out of the 24 participants misremembered the ‘lost in the mall’ incident as true. This experiment was one of the first to prove that memories can be false, and it happens more easily than most people realize.
Overall, our memories may not be as reliable as we think. However, now that you know your memory can play tricks on you, hopefully you’re more aware of what memories are actually true and which could be false. Memories are usually reliable but have been proven to be able to be misled. This concept may seem a little scary, but as long as we are aware of false memories and what they can accomplish we can stop them from causing harm. The last thing I would like you to think about after reading this, is after everything you have learned, do you believe that expert eyewitness testimonies should be allowed in court?
References
Innocence Project. (2019, August 29). Retrieved from https://www.innocenceproject.org/about/
Loftus, E. F. (1999). Lost in the Mall: Misrepresentations and Misunderstandings. Ethics & Behavior, 9(1), 51–60. doi: 10.1207/s15327019eb0901_4
Takarangi, M. K. T., Strange, D., Shortland, A. E., & James, H. E. (2013). Source confusion influences the effectiveness of the autobiographical IAT. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 20(6), 1232–1238. doi: 10.3758/s13423-013-0430-3