Eyewitness
Australian eyewitness expert Donald Thomson appeared on a live TV discussion about the unreliability of eyewitness memory. He was later arrested, placed in a lineup and identified by a victim as the man who had raped her. The police charged Thomson although the rape had occurred at the time he was on TV. They dismissed his alibi that he was in plain view of a TV audience and in the company of the other discussants, including an assistant commissioner of police. The policeman taking his statement sneered, “Yes, I suppose you’ve got Jesus Christ, and the Queen of England, too.”
Several studies have been conducted on human memory and on subjects’ propensity to remember erroneously events and details that did not occur. Elizabeth Loftus performed experiments in the mid-seventies demonstrating the effect of a third party’s introducing false facts into memory.
Eyewitness testimony is a legal term. It refers to an account given by people of an event they have witnessed. For example they may be required to give a description at a trail of a robbery or a road accident someone has seen. This includes identification of perpetrators, details of the crime scene etc.
Eyewitness testimony is an important areas of research in cognitive psychology and human memory.
Jurys tend to pay close attention to eyewitness testimony and generally find it a reliable source of informtion. However, research into this area has found that eyewitness testimony can be affectd by many psychological factors.
Kevin:
This is an excellent example of eyewitness testimony gone horribly awry.
Approximately 5 years ago a young coed with a BAC of approximately .3 at the time was sexually assaulted while in a blacked out state. She thought her attacker was the man she last remembered speaking to that night despite the presence of her ex-lover’s semen in her underwear that night.
This link from ESPN has a accurate, if highly dramatized, narrative of the events that night and the trial that ensued.
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/news/story?id=4300383
This link deconstructs the prosecution case against the athlete.
15 June 2011, 3:14 pmhttp://www.independent.com/news/2009/dec/30/exonerating-eric-frimpong/
Jack Thompson:
Strange, yesterday I was reading Galen Rowell’s excellent book on photography, Mountain Light. I randomly flipped to a page and started reading. The first sentence I came to read, “I noticed that whenever I tried to recall something, the images that came to my mind were as still photographs. Even if I attempted an ‘instant’ replay of an experience, I found myself connecting a series of still flashes in my mind. A lawyer friend told me that he uses this known quirk of the brain to trip up eyewitnesses who unwittingly try to fill the gaps between remembered glimpses of reality. Memory selects single important images, just as the camera does.”
16 June 2011, 12:08 ammichele:
Has anyone else noticed an interesting kind of serendipity to posts here? Serendipty in the sense of unexpected, yet profound coincidence between the subject matter and subject matter pertinent to one’s very recent experiences/conversations in the non-digitized world. This is two posts in one day that make the case, (not empirically of course,) for collective consciousness in a very visceral sense. Thanks Stan.
16 June 2011, 10:39 amJasper Stoodly:
Well.. I can’t help but wonder what happened to the poor fellow who was charged. There is a frightening Orwellianism about this story. And what happened to the stupid policeman? Nothing, I suppose.
16 June 2011, 7:20 pmStan:
I actually posted this not just to show how arbitrary liberal law can be, but because it raises some pretty serious questions about what memory actually is. When you really think about it, memory is quite a riddle.
17 June 2011, 9:27 pmDeAnander:
The plasticity of memory is a very disturbing subject… we have to believe in some kind of coherent narrative called “the past” — after all, we’re supposed to learn from it! And in general “the past” conforms fairly well to expectation: the grocery store where you usually shop stays in the location you remember (unless it goes out of business), your house is where you left it this morning, the people whose faces you recognise as friends generally recognise you back.
But then there are those bizarre lapses, like the chapter (complete with illustrations) that I could swear I read in ‘Black Beauty’ when I was a kid, which simply doesn’t exist in any edition I have ever seen since. Like your pencil or keys showing up in someplace you simply don’t remember ever putting anything. And suddenly the whole structure called “the past” seems very fragile.
I’ve read some of the research about eyewitness accounts, inability to recognise models and colours of cars (with a reality-fade happening pretty quickly after a witnessed event) and so on. It’s extremely troubling. We haven’t any way to understand the world, really, other than the stories we tell and are told. We have to believe some of them. We have to believe that when people tell us this tree is an apple tree, they’re remembering right and it will bear apples this Fall — that their memories of seeing, touching, eating apples are true. But the psych researchers keep showing us how frighteningly malleable human memory is, how eyewitnesses can be gently persuaded to remember things differently (photographs, videotape, other checkable “events”) from the original witnessed action.
Bearing witness is so important in so many cultures. Maybe the very reason it’s so important is that we know how fragile memory really is and how essential is the shared memory of the community to fact-check our own individual, frail capacity for remembering?
18 June 2011, 1:13 amStan:
My sister and brother tell me things all the time that I don’t remember from our childhood. I was the one who moved the furthest fastest and left our old acquaintances behind. So I was not there when the stories were recirculated (and probably censored or embellished, though I lost touch with the stories altogether).
18 June 2011, 7:11 amjoal:
First of all I want to thank feral scholar for its comments and wisdom. I’ve never really taken the time, or found the right places to find information and logic to a world that seems to have so many holes and hidden truths, specifically in regards to US foreign policies, and the way we are constantly distracted and lied to on what seems to be a daily basis.
I just learned about feral scholar, and the messages that are being published and put out by many who feel the same way. Some would call it fate, others would say I am just seeking what I want to believe…I call it exposure to reality. Thank you all.
So, on topic now…I believe that witness testimony is a problem, yes…but examine it deeper, and there always seems to be an over reliance on using witness testimony. All the reports we here from the news, none of them ever really happen in live documented form. So that fact alone, I conclude that pretty much every thing that ever hits the media, is typically reported by a witness.
That scares me. I remember playing the game telephone, where we would sit down and see if we could successfully pass a message along by whispering it into eachother’s ears. It never worked out for me. But this simple game explains the way communication along with distortion of the actual event, can give us a desired report that solicits a desired reaction.
Of course, anything that involves human perception has inherit flaws. I think witness testimony CAN be helpful for things, but too much of it results in a crutch for getting answers and results that are desired, but not neccessarily the truth. And its funny how witness testimonies are always available for certain things, but then when we REALLY want the truth, its conveniently not available for us (the whole OBL thing? Yea…)
There is not only a problem with widespread witness testimony, but also the way the message gets convoluted within the entire process of communication. Leaving me always questioning and wondering what really happens when I hear about something that took place somewhere across the globe in the middle of nowhere. Not to say its completely unreliable, but the overlooked flaws make it seem infallible which it certainly is not.
18 June 2011, 7:33 amStan:
During my time in the army, I read intelligence summaries and news reports about operations in which I was involved. In neither case did I ever see an example of either one that was accurate. Not one.
18 June 2011, 9:42 amBob:
It’s a matter of perception. Scary part is how many people are employed in “perception management”. Just a few key words in the right place and time and the situation is framed for the “eyewittness” to reach the obvious conclusions. When the passport of Mohammed Atta was found within two hours of the World Trade Center collaspe my bullshit alarm went off. Never did get over that one.
19 June 2011, 4:05 pmKarl:
The old childhood game of “telephone,” where you start a notion at one end of a line of kids and listen for the notion’s interpretation at the end of the line of kids, with the message conveyed one-by-one between kids in the line… it tells an observant human anything he/she needs to know about the power and accuracy of “memory,” which is nothing but a subjective myth-making. People remember what they want to remember and forget what they want to forget. Generally what’s remembered or forgotten depends on the effect upon the memory-maker’s sense of guilt, complicity, self-respect. A “good” memory exonerates the guilty and gives esteem to the forgettable.
When I used to do litigation I saw all kinds of “under oath” recall that was pure bullshit. Usually the recollection happened to coincide with the ability to make money in a lawsuit.
4 July 2011, 10:56 amJan Martell:
I think “bullshit” is the wrong word here. Bullshit is when you don’t care what the truth is and just make stuff up to hear the sound of your own voice.
I think this problem touches on one of our essential human traits. We tell stories. Given a random flash of impressions, we stitch them together in some order that seems to fit, because we need coherence in our mental constructions of reality. And if we have help with this process, say from a prosecutor who seems to know more than we do, or if we can’t remember much and we are being urged to be more specific, we want to please, and have our stories accepted. Or, when the consequences of coming up with one kind of story rather than another exert an irresistible force, we provide the needed details more easily.
This seems to be how dreams work. You’re in some deeper level of sleep firing away at the old synapses, releasing tensions built up from stimulations during your active day, when you surface into a more conscious level. Suddenly you are seeing a random collection of images and associations, and you assemble them into a coherent story, to make it acceptable to conscious thought. Fill in the gaps, connect the non-connectable. And that’s why the dream stories have so much significance – why did you put it together in just that way?
We accept dreams as metaphor or parable, but want to make individual conscious memory rock-solid fact. It must be more of a sliding scale, maybe needing corroboration by other observers. Pitfalls there, too. Mass hallucination and mass delusion are also well known.
6 July 2011, 11:24 pmSean McEntee:
An old saying that I recall often is:
24 July 2011, 9:15 am“The palest ink is better than the best memory.”
Karl:
Jan, I chose the word with intent and do not appreciate the pseudo-correction. You are not me and have not lived my life. Your attempt to reframe MY experiences is repellent. And confounding.
3 August 2011, 6:19 pmCurt:
There I was playing cards. In the background someone was flipping through the tV channels. For a moment the flipping stoped. I heard the narrator say, that in 2004 an EU government employee discovered that not only was Greece way over the 3 percent GDP budget deficit limit, it was spending way more on defence expenditures than it was publically stating. He reported this to his supiriors and was appalled to see absolutely nothing happen.
8 May 2012, 2:47 pmA few seconds latter the tV started flipping a gain.
Did I imagine hearing this report? Is this evidence of stupidity at the highest levels or something all togehter different?
I bet that no one will want to touch this with a ten foot pole.
This is not funny. The chance that Greece was going to be involved in a non civil war early in the 21st century is close to zero. Obviously massive stupidity was at least going on here. Uhhh I want to hit someone with a hammer.