False Memories are Normal so Memory Itself Cannot be Trusted; It is a Reconstruction Highly Influenced by Normal Living and Eyewitness Testimony is Responsible for Wrongful Convictions

By David William Jedell Updated November 1, 2024

Although our memories seem to be a solid, straightforward sum of who we are, strong evidence suggests that memories are actually quite complex, subject to change, and often unreliable. We reconstruct memories as we age and also as our worldview changes. We falsely recall childhood events, and through effective suggestion, can even create new false memories. We can be tricked into remembering events that never happened, or change the details of things that really did happen. Malleable memory can have especially dire consequences in legal settings; highlighted areas of interest are children as eyewitnesses, sexual abuse, and misidentification. One of the more influential researchers in this area, Elizabeth Loftus of the University of California at Irvine, has been known to work on numerous high-profile legal cases including that of murderer Ted Bundy, the McMartin preschool, Scooter Libby, among many others. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/false-memories

Just because someone tells you something with a lot of confidence and detail and emotion, it doesn't mean it actually happened. You need independent corroboration to know whether you're dealing with an authentic memory, or something that is a product of some other process.”

1. Memory does not work like a video camera, accurately recording all of the details of witnessed events. Instead, memory (like perception) is a constructive process. We typically remember the gist of an event rather than the exact details.

2. When we construct a memory, errors can occur. We will typically fill in gaps in our memories with what we think we must have experienced not necessarily what we actually did experience. We may also include misinformation we encountered after the event. We will not even be consciously aware that this has happened.

3. We not only distort memories for events that we have witnessed, we may have completely false memories for events that never occurred at all. Such false memories are particularly likely to arise in certain contexts, such as (unintentionally) through the use of certain dubious psychotherapeutic techniques or (intentionally) in psychology experiments.

4. There is no convincing evidence to support the existence of the psychoanalytic concept of repression, despite it being a widely accepted concept.

5. There is currently no way to distinguish, in the absence of independent evidence, whether a particular memory is true or false. Even memories which are detailed and vivid and held with 100 percent conviction can be completely false.” https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/mind-guest-blog/what-experts-wish-you-knew-about-false-memories/

Summaries of 46 Cases in Which Mistaken or Perjured. Eyewitness Testimony Put Innocent Persons on Death Row https://dpic-cdn.org/production/legacy/StudyCWC2001A.pdf

The 10 Worst Failures of Eyewitness Testimony https://www.theinvestigators.co.nz/news/the-10-worst-failures-of-eyewitness-testimony-part-one

Loftus and Palmer (1974) showed different videos of a car collision to different participants. Some saw a video of the car crashing at 20mph, others a video of a collision at 30mph and the rest a video of a crash at 40mph. The participants were then asked the speed of the collision in a survey question. The question was identical for each participant except for the verb mentioned when describing the crash. Some verbs suggested that the crash was a minor collision, others a full-blown crash. The experiment results showed that the verb used to describe the crash had more effect on the speed estimated than the actual speed of the car that the participants witnessed in the video. In a second experiment, participants were shown similar videos of a car and later questioned about what they had witnessed. The question asked the subject whether or not they had seen any broken glass following the collision, and again, the verb describing the collision was altered to suggest varying degrees of severity. Both studies suggest that the framing of questions following an event can affect our recollection of it, even after it has been remembered. Even seemingly slight changes, such as verb alterations in Loftus and Palmer's experiments, can create false memories of events. In fact, Loftus found in a later experiment that even the switching of 'a' and 'the' in a question can influence respondents' recollection of an object. Loftus, Miller and Burns (1978) showed participants a number of slides of a car at a junction. They were later questioned regarding the scene. Some were asked whether they had seen 'a' stop sign, others 'the' stop sign. Lotus et al found that those participants asked about 'the' stop sign were more likely to recollect it than other group. The use of the definite article seems to assure people that an object exists without them needing to question its accuracy.

All of these experiments support Loftus' misinformation effect on our memories - the manipulation of past event recollection by misguidance following it; a case of what the German psychologist Georg Müller (1850-1934) may have identified as retroactive interference of information on our memories (Lechner, Squire and Byrne, 1999). Inventing an entire event. We have learnt from these experiments that our memory cannot necessarily be relied on for the recollection of specific details of an event. But we would know if we had been lead to believe that an entire event had been suggested to us - or would we? This question was answered by one of Elizabeth Loftus' psychology students in an experiment to gain extra credits at university: James Coan (1997) produced four booklets containing recollections of events from childhood and gave each to a family member. The stories in the booklets were true except for the one given to Coan's brother - a description of him being lost in a shopping mall as a child, an older man finding him and him then finding his family again.1 Each family member was asked to read through the booklets and familiarise themselves with their contents, after which they were asked to recall the stories. Coan's brother recalled the story with additional details invented by himself, and was unable to identify his as being the falsified story. This lost in the mall technique of implanting false memories was further tested in a formal experiment with Loftus and Jacqueline Pickrell (Loftus and Pickrell, 1995), and shows how we can even adopt rich false memories that are entirely invented. https://www.psychologistworld.com/memory/false-memories-questioning-eyewitness-testimony

Eyewitness testimony, which relies on the accuracy of human memory, has an enormous impact on the outcome of a trial. Aside from smoking pistol, nothing carries as much weight with a jury as the testimony of an actual witness. The memory of witnesses is crucial not only in criminal cases but in civil cases as well--in automobile accident cases, for example, eyewitness testimony carries great weight in determining who is as fault. Implicit in the acceptance of this testimony as solid evidence is the assumption that the human mind is a precise recorder and storer of events. Human beings hold fiercely to the belief that our memories are preserved intact, our thoughts are essentially imperishable, and our impressions are never really forgotten. Sigmund Freud believed that long-term memories lie deep in the unconscious mind, too deep to be disturbed by ongoing events and experiences. Truth and reality, when seen through the filter of our memories, are not objective facts but subjective, interpretive realities. We interpret the past, correcting ourselves, adding bits and pieces, deleting uncomplimentary or disturbing recollections, sweeping, dusting, tidying things up. Thus our representation of the past takes on a living, shifting reality; it is not fixed and immutable, not a place way back there that is preserved in stone, but a living thing that changes shape, expands, shrinks, and expands again, an amoebalike creature with powers to make us laugh, and cry, and clench our fists. Enormous powers--powers even to make us believe in something that never happened. Are we aware of our mind's distortions of our experiences? In most cases, the answer is no. As event sequences unfold memories gradually change, we become convinced that we saw or said or did what we remember. We perceive the blending of fact and fiction that constitutes a memory as completely and utterly truthful. We are innocent victims of our mind's manipulations. The danger of eyewitness testimony is clear: Anyone in the world can be convicted of a crime he or she did not commit, or deprived of an award that is due, based solely on the evidence of a witness who convinces a jury that his memory about what he saw is correct. Why is the eyewitness testimony so powerful and convincing? Because people in general and jurors in particular believe that our memories stamp the facts of experiences on a permanent, non erasable tape, like a computer disk or videotape that is write-protected. For the most part, of course, our memories serve us reasonably well. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/dna/photos/eye/text_06.html

Over time, faulty memories may actually be rewired physically in the brain. Not so long ago, neuroscientists used to think the human brain was 'hard-wired' with fixed circuits of neurons. Now we know better. The brain is actually soft-wired, meaning it is plastic and malleable, undergoing significant changes as we learn and age. https://www.sciencealert.com/profound-brain-changes-of-pregnancy-revealed-in-scientific-first

Researchers estimate that eyewitness error plays a role in half or more of all wrongful felony convictions. https://scholarship.law.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1140&context=scholar [2]

Two eyewitnesses confidently testified before the San Diego Superior Court that Uriah Courtney was the perpetrator of a monstrous crime. These witnesses maintained with certainty that they had seen this very person, that they remembered him accurately and could identify him from a single photograph. They maintained not simply that Courtney’s was the most familiar or likely face among the lineup photos, but that—against all odds—he was the one. Knowing well the consequences for the accused, and discounting any possibility of error, Erika pleaded to the Court for retribution. The evidence incompatible with Courtney, but the DNA instead matched a former convict living not far from the crime scene. Based on this new evidence, Courtney’s conviction was vacated and he was released from prison in 2013, after having served 8 y behind bars. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5544328/

The leading cause of the wrongful convictions was erroneous identification by eyewitnesses, which occurred 79 percent of the time. In a quarter of the cases, such testimony was the only direct evidence against the defendant. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/23/us/23bar.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

Related Material

Profound Brain Changes and Non Linear Thinking. The brain is actually soft-wired, meaning it is plastic and malleable, undergoing significant changes as we learn and age. When neuronal circuits are fine-tuned for whatever reason, gray matter tends to be pruned back while white matter connections increase, allowing information to travel around the brain more efficiently (and for a higher IQ). https://www.sciencealert.com/profound-brain-changes-of-pregnancy-revealed-in-scientific-first

Copyright © 2024 David William Jedell Email: d.w.jedell@gmail.com