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.
Given the dangers of mistaken convictions based on faulty eyewitness estimony, how can we minimize such errors? The Innocence Project has proposed legislation to improve the accuracy of eyewitness IDs. Although only a few cities and states have adopted laws to improve the accuracy of eyewitness identifications, there seems to be a growing interest in doing so.
Expert Testimony In addition, allowing experts on eyewitness identification to testify in court could educate juries and perhaps lead to more measured evaluation of the testimony. Most U. Yet psychologist Gary Wells of Iowa State University and his colleague Lisa Hasel have amassed considerable evidence showing that the experimental findings do apply to courtroom testimony and that they are often counterintuitive.
Science can and should inform judicial processes to improve the accuracy and assessment of eyewitness accounts. We are seeing some small steps in this direction, but our courts still have a long way to go to better ensure that innocent people are not punished because of flaws in this very influential type of evidence.
Error-Prone IDs A number of factors can reduce the accuracy of eyewitness identifications. Here are some of them:. Already a subscriber? Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Create your free account or Sign in to continue. See Subscription Options. Discover World-Changing Science. Steven Avery , the subject of the documentary, was falsely convicted of rape and spent 18 years behind bars before being exonerated.
And eyewitness suggestibility — where witnesses are willing to accept and act on the suggestions of others if false but plausible information is given — was at the heart of the case.
Miscarriages of justice can occur more often than television documentaries would have us believe — across a variety of crimes. William Mills , for example, was falsely identified for robbing a bank in Glasgow. He was sentenced to nine years based on police identification from CCTV images — which showed a man in sunglasses with a scarf over his mouth and chin. Another notable case was the Jill Dando murder enquiry in An innocent suspect Barry George was convicted of murder after witnesses discussed the case with each other and changed their minds based on the information one witness presented with.
Many factors such as memory decay, poor eyesight and induced stress have already been shown to have an influence in false testimony. But these factors can only explain a small percentage of false eyewitness statements. Importantly, these errors, once made, can be very hard to unmake. Some small memory errors are commonplace, and you have no doubt experienced many of them. You set down your keys without paying attention, and then cannot find them later when you go to look for them.
Other sorts of memory biases are more complicated and longer lasting. For example, it turns out that our expectations and beliefs about how the world works can have huge influences on our memories. The result of this lack of attention, however, is that one is likely to remember schema-consistent information such as tables , and to remember them in a rather generic way, whether or not they were actually present.
But some experimental psychologists believed that the memories were instead likely to be false—created in therapy. The student subjects were told that the researchers had talked to their family members and learned about four different events from their childhoods. The researchers asked if the now undergraduate students remembered each of these four events—introduced via short hints.
The subjects were asked to write about each of the four events in a booklet and then were interviewed two separate times. The trick was that one of the events came from the researchers rather than the family and the family had actually assured the researchers that this event had not happened to the subject. In the first such study, this researcher-introduced event was a story about being lost in a shopping mall and rescued by an older adult.
For example, one group of researchers used a mock-advertising study, wherein subjects were asked to review fake advertisements for Disney vacations, to convince subjects that they had once met the character Bugs Bunny at Disneyland—an impossible false memory because Bugs is a Warner Brothers character Braun et al. Another group of researchers photoshopped childhood photographs of their subjects into a hot air balloon picture and then asked the subjects to try to remember and describe their hot air balloon experience Wade et al.
Other researchers gave subjects unmanipulated class photographs from their childhoods along with a fake story about a class prank, and thus enhanced the likelihood that subjects would falsely remember the prank Lindsay et al. Using a false feedback manipulation, we have been able to persuade subjects to falsely remember having a variety of childhood experiences. In these studies, subjects are told falsely that a powerful computer system has analyzed questionnaires that they completed previously and has concluded that they had a particular experience years earlier.
Subjects apparently believe what the computer says about them and adjust their memories to match this new information. A variety of different false memories have been implanted in this way. To conclude, eyewitness testimony is very powerful and convincing to jurors, even though it is not particularly reliable. Identification errors occur, and these errors can lead to people being falsely accused and even convicted. Likewise, eyewitness memory can be corrupted by leading questions, misinterpretations of events, conversations with co-witnesses, and their own expectations for what should have happened.
People can even come to remember whole events that never occurred. The problems with memory in the legal system are real. But what can we do to start to fix them? A number of specific recommendations have already been made, and many of these are in the process of being implemented e. Some of these recommendations are aimed at specific legal procedures, including when and how witnesses should be interviewed, and how lineups should be constructed and conducted.
Other recommendations call for appropriate education often in the form of expert witness testimony to be provided to jury members and others tasked with assessing eyewitness memory.
Eyewitness testimony can be of great value to the legal system, but decades of research now argues that this testimony is often given far more weight than its accuracy justifies.
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