In my personal experience, a person's memory strength is quite different. Some seem to have a great memory and very accurate and some forget what they had for breakfast. For example, my mother can never remember something small and insignificant that happened in the morning, but she magically can remember (or convince herself that she remembers) an argument from months ago.
As we learned in this week's lesson the memory is vulnerable to suggestion. For example the case that Elizabeth Loftus dealt with where she discovered that the young girl's memories were in fact implanted and not real at all. In the case a 6 year old girl accused her mother of sexually abusing her, custody was rewarded to her father. Over a number of years the girl lost all memory of the supposed abuse. However 11 years later the same doctor that had originally interviewed her re-interviewed her and she was suddenly able to recall detailed episodes. After much study and interview of key players in the case Loftus concluded the abuse never happened and the child was coached.
What this case teaches us if anything is to take everything with a grain of salt. Referring back to our textbook it says an issue with eyewitness testimony for example is ethnicity. "Because of unfamiliarity with other ethnic groups, the eyewitness may focus solely on the ethnicity of the person they see committing a crime and ignore the distinctive features that would later make identification more accurate. Also the text book warns us that the mind is vulnerable to suggestions depending on how a question is asked. Is such things as wording of a question can change what we thought or thought we saw can we really be reliable?
Can we be trusted to make or give accurate descriptions of an event that we believed to have happened? In my opinion it all depends on the situation that we are trying to remember something or the person that is questioning us. Are they trying to influence us or are they trying to get an accurate account on what happened? This is why hard evidence will always be the deciding factor of a case, not eyewitness testimony. There are just too many openings for falsification.
Good evening class and a happy new year to everyone! First of all I would just like to start by saying how interesting I found all of this weeks reading involving memory in court cases. I honestly had no idea that all of the false implanting of memory was ever a thing before this week's lesson. In the LA Weekly article we learned a great deal about Dr. Loftus's experiments and research. One experiment that Dr. Lotus and her students did in the 1960's was to show just how manipulative the human memory could be. Her students went home and asked their younger siblings if they remembered the time that they got lost in the mall when they were 5 years old and then would record what the sibling said.
As time went on the giving experience that was presented would get much more detailed and vivid. To make sure that they actually were making up a story, one of the final stories was about when they met Bugs Bunny at Disney World. This proved that it had to be a false memory because Bugs Bunny is a Warner Bros character, not a Disney character. To me this experiment sums up a great deal about how easy it is to put an idea inside a child's mind just simply by telling them that it happened.
In Chapter eight of our book I learned more about children's testimony and how interviewers and police investigators were leading the children into saying and believing the event that they were asked about was real. In this case it was about child abuse in day care centers. Although no child in the daycare facility had complained to their parents about being abused, and not parent had witnessed the abuse ever occurring, many teachers were sentenced to years in prison without any hard evidence other than the child's testimony. A group of psychologists took a deeper look into this once the number kept skyrocketing in these types of cases.
They found that the people that interviewed the children were saying phrases such as; "Let's pretend it happened!" and that encouraged the childes imagination to inflate to it actually happening. The interviewer would encourage the child to say terrible events and tell them that everyone else was saying them and then offer bribes and treats if the child said something happened to them. Luckily now psychologists have developed way to interview children that reduce the chances of false reporting in how they word questions that are asked. All in all I feel that any eyewitness testimony can not single handedly be the sole barer of evidence in any court case due to these fact presented.
The fact that the human memory can be very unreliable makes me believe that using solely an eye witness for court cases would not be a very good idea. In our text I remember reading about how we may think we are remembering correctly but in cases where we experience a traumatic event things can be confusing and remembered different from the actual scenario that happened. I could think I am correct by the feelings or the bits and pieces of detail I am seeing in my mind but those feelings can be completely different then the truth.
Another aspect would be that the human mind is greatly influenced by others opinions or their own version of what happened. If someone were to suggest that a specific thing happened in an event that I may have not been aware of the mind can make us believe that is the truth anyways. Another example would be if a eye witness saw a suspect but only for a moment, I think it is very hard to get the appearance of someone correct when asked about it later when it all usually happens very quickly. It is very easy to mix up someones facial structure, hair color or what they were wearing if they only saw that person for a moment. This would make a eye witness hard to believe if there is no other proof of the crime that happened.
I kind of think humans are very unreliable witnesses if we base something just on their memory. We are so easily distracted, molded, and tampered with that so many things can influence what we say, think, and remember about anything in our daily life, let alone a situation that is scary and happens very quickly. In the article we read this week I really liked this quote "...physiologically, the truth is less important than an individual's perception of the truth (Abramsky, 2004)." I feel like this speaks volumes on how human-beings view the truth. I do not think a majority of people think they are telling lies but sometimes I think if we think something happened than it is our version of the truth. It is hard to remember things accurately all the time and even more so when put into stressful situations. I think that in court cases it is a tough call to believe what one person perceives as the truth when there could in fact be so much more to the story.