Mr. Stewart mentioned in class that eyewitnesses are not necessarily the most reliable source of evidence. Memories change all the time, so there has recently been a rethinking of how much weight should be placed on eyewitness accounts.
Experiments have shown that people sometimes still remain confident in their own memory even when they are shown evidence that their memory of the event is not right. Also, there is research showing that "police interrogators can unconsciously coach people into having false memories."
About 75% of wrongful convictions for rape and murder were based on eyewitness testimony, and according to the Innocence Project, flawed identification has been "cited as a factor in nearly 78 percent of the nation's first 130 convictions later overturned by DNA testing."
There are currently debates on the best way to avoid these mistaken identifications, but it's clear that eyewitnesses are not the most reliable source for evidence, as can be seen in the varying testimonies of the witnesses of the Kennedy assassination.
Sources:
http://news.sciencemag.org/policy/2014/10/how-reliable-eyewitness-testimony-scientists-weigh
http://www.apa.org/monitor/apr06/eyewitness.aspx
One way people often classify the different types of memory failure in physchology is commonly referred to as "The Seven Sins of Memory." These sins include Transience, Absent-mindedness, Blocking, Suggestibility, Bias, Persistence and Misattribution. Misattribution is said to be "attribution of memories to incorrect sources or believing that you have seen or heard something you haven't." It seems very possible that some of the Kennedy "hear" witnesses could be experiencing this sin of memory.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.apa.org/monitor/oct03/sins.aspx
Thank you for this interesting post. I read a study somewhere for Psychology that eye witnesses can also contribute to false convictions by being given a line up of possible suspects and being asked to select the person... if any of them... committed the crime. Police reports showed that witnesses often chose the person whom most accurately fit their mental impression of the character, but was not always the person whom actually committed the crime.
ReplyDeleteEven witnesses who had some doubt as to whether or not whom they selected was the actual convict still selected the person who best fit their description even if some traits did not match up with their memory of the character. Often times, the witness ignored these discrepancies between their memory and the character in the line up in a similar way that math analysts would ignore outliers in a set of data to improve the accuracy of data results.
Witness reliability, however, increased when asked to describe all character traits of the convict before they were presented with a character line up. By doing this, witnesses became less likely to ignore discrepancies that they had already written on paper.
This is always an interesting topic. In AP Psychology, we did some research on these topics, and it's very interesting to see what influences eyewitness testimonies. In one study, multiple people were shown a car crash. However, when they were all asked about it later, they gave different recollections on what happened. As Mr. Stewart said, "everyone sees things in a different way". The influence of peer pressure also is a big factor, as when a subject was asked questions while in a group of others, if the others said the wrong answer, they would too. So, in eyewitness testimonies, people could easily be told what they saw, and change their memory to what the common public remembrance is.
ReplyDelete