Essay eyewitness testimony

-look at the work of Elizabeth loftus (and her tedtalk)

-misinformation effect (when police do interviews they unconsciously plant biases in the witness
that influence them)
-stress level is important to how events are remembered
-if weapons are involved, weapon effect
-racial despiracing between the people witnessing and the event, angle of the room etc can
really affect how people remember
-issues of mistaken identity (loftus and Palmer)

Eyewitness testimony is a legal term that refers to an account given by people of an event they
have witnessed.

For example, they may be required to describe a trial of a robbery or a road accident someone
has seen. This includes the identification of perpetrators, details of the crime scene, etc.

https://simplypsychology.org/eyewitness-testimony.html

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/04/05/how-elizabeth-loftus-changed-the-meaning-
of-memory

https://simplypsychology.org/loftus-palmer.html

https://www.jstor.org/stable/48562988?searchText=Eyewitness+testimony&searchUri=
%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3DEyewitness
%2Btestimony&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default
%3A584fa345c95d3d1713f6edd7767278e2

https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvbtzpfm.20?searchText=Eyewitness+testimony&searchUri=
%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3DEyewitness
%2Btestimony&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default
%3A584fa345c95d3d1713f6edd7767278e2

https://www.jstor.org/stable/27821012?searchText=Eyewitness+testimony&searchUri=
%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3DEyewitness
%2Btestimony&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default
%3A584fa345c95d3d1713f6edd7767278e2

Memory tempered by recall

Memory tempered by guiding questions, influence
Memory that’s just plain fake
https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794/22141/Final%20Thesis-
Yilmaz.pdf?sequence=1#:~:text=There%20are%20two%20main%20effects,Decreased
%20encoding%20as%20stress%20increases.

The Unreliability of Eyewitness Testimony and the Ways Memory Fail us

Amelie Zhao

Sheridan College

PSYC16571GD Principles of Psychology

Kirsten Madsen

April 3, 2023
 Most people would like to believe that their memory is fairly reliable. The practice of

using eyewitness testimony, the description of the incident under investigation given by a victim

or bystander in court, is based on such an assumption. The witness’s recollection is used as

damning evidence and is considered a credible source of the events transpired since the

beginning of the 20th century. Only relatively recently has its reliability come under serious

doubt based on psychologists' claims that an individual's memories could be inaccurate,

manipulated, biased, and even completely made up with no basis in reality. There exists a

significant amount of research on eyewitness testimonies that lead to wrongful conviction and

overwhelming proof that its accuracy is dubious at the least.

Kirk Bloodsworth, born in 1960 was the first American sentenced to death then later

exonerated by DNA testing. When Bloodsworth was convicted in 1984 for rape and murder it

was done solely by eyewitness testimony, with no actual physical or circumstantial evidence

linking him to the crime. No less than five witnesses testified that Bloodsworth was with the

victim and yet, DNA testing proved his innocence and he was released after nine years on death

row. According to research, Bloodsworth was far from the only one to suffer such a fate. Over

two thousand wrongly convicted Americans had been exonerated since 1989 (Rakoff & Loftus,

2018). The most common source of these wrongful convictions, and sometimes the only reason

behind them, are inaccurate eyewitness accounts. The Innocence Project, a non-profit legal

organization committed to exonerate wrongfully convicted individuals, have found more than

three hundred innocent people who had been erroneously incarcerated, often of serious crimes

such as murder and rape. More than seventy percent of those cases had false eyewitness

testimony as a material part of the evidence resulting in conviction. If eyewitness testimony has
been proven to be so prone to inaccuracies, it is important to question why they still play such an

important role in today’s justice system, and what causes memories to become faulty.

The accounts of witnesses to a crime are held as straight-forward and damning in most

cases, due to the reasoning that the eyewitness is usually a bystander with no connection to the

case and therefore no motive to lie. They are an easy source for information and trusted by

anyone from the police to judicial officers. Simply put, the witness, most often an unfortunate

passerby of a horrific scene, would do their best to give an honest recounting of the crime as

their duty. With the exemption of some eyewitnesses who happen to be accomplices, the

majority are largely giving truthfully recountings of their point of view. If that is the case, the

question becomes why would eyewitness testimonies be wrong so frequently?

The factors that affect eyewitness memory can be sorted into the groups of system

variables and estimator variables. Estimator variables are the situational factors outside of

anyone’s control such as the stress levels of the witness, the attributes of those involved in the

crime, and if there was a weapon present. Conversely, system variables are the controllable facts

often instigated by the professionals involved in the case, such as the use of leading questions in

interrogation.

Human memory is highly malleable. To create a memory, the brain has to first encode

the experience, it has to be stored, and retrieved when it is needed at a later time. Short-term

memories which last only fifteen to thirty seconds, can be lost if it is not converted to long-term

memories. This consolidation phase requires and depends on a number of complex changes in

brain structure and dendrites. The act of recollection, the retrieving of memory is when it is most

susceptible to distortion. Some might believe that long-term memories are fairly stable and

consistent, but they are in fact not permanent and are altered everytime they are retrieved
(Giroux et al., 2018). Eyewitness memory is mostly considered to be autobiographical, and as

Redman (2010) wrote, “it has three major components: verbal narrative, imagery, and emotions.”

These memories are recalled as stories told to others, and associate certain images and details

that are exaggerated, while the emotions of the experience can impact retrieval as well.

Eyewitnesses may experience high levels of stress at the scene of a crime, so

understanding how stress influences memory recall is important to the topic. Each time a

memory is remembered some information related to the memory is lost, in the phenomena

retrieval-induced forgetting. Studies have shown that stress may affect memory in such a way

that retrieval-induced forgetting does not have as much influence over individuals. In one study,

groups of participants memorized categorized lists and were then “exposed to either a

psychosocial laboratory stressor or a cognitively challenging control treatment” (Koessler et al.,

2009). When the participants were tested on the previously learned material they found that the

stress group did not perform any worse than the control group. Moreover, it seems that

psychosocial stress reduces retrieval-induced forgetting as a result of stress-induced hormones in

the participants. A 2021 survey on beliefs about the effect of stress on eyewitness memory found

that a high proportion of experts in the field agreed that very high levels of stress will impair

recall accuracy. A majority of fundamental memory experts are inclined to believe stress

experienced during encoding can in fact enhance the memory (Marr et al., 2021). Perhaps

contradictory to this view, a study by Kuehn (1974) found that victims usually reported more

information in less-serious crimes compared to violent ones. Another study in a similar vein put

participants through either a high-stress interrogation or a low-stress interrogation, with the

participants under high-stress levels less likely to identify their interrogators and gave more false

positive identifications compared to low-stress.

 Standard police procedure includes showing the eyewitness photos of the suspects or

asking the eyewitness to identify who the criminal is from a lineup of a number of individuals.

These methods are suspect to a host of phenomena that may cause inaccuracies. Unconscious

transference is when a witness identifies an innocent bystander as the criminal because of the

witness’s exposure to the bystander in another context, such as from a photograph. The

bystander’s face becomes unconsciously familiar to the witness and causes the misidentification.

While pinpointing suspects in a lineup, relative judgment could also affect the outcome. When

the criminal is not present in the lineup, the eyewitness will unconsciously identify the individual

most resembling the perpetrator. Another large factor in inaccurate identification is race. The

cross-race effect, known also as the own-race bias, demonstrates that people are better at

recognizing individuals of their own race as opposed to a less familiar race. The contact

hypothesis theory explains this phenomenon by reasoning that people usually have a higher

contact rate with members of their own race and therefore become experts at recognizing racially

specific features. Relatively low contact with members of other races leads to less competency

differentiating faces of those races. Harvard et al., (2017) studied this effect by having 319

British school children watch two videos of similarly staged robberies, one with a Caucasian

thief and the other with an Asian thief. The children were then shown two lineups after a few

days, one containing the culprit and one that did not. Interestingly the Caucasian children showed

an own-race bias and the Asian children did not show any bias.
 Rakoff, J. S., & Loftus, E. F. (2018). The Intractability of Inaccurate Eyewitness
Identification. Daedalus, 147(4), 90–98. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48562988

Giroux, M. E., Boyd, L., Connolly, D. A., & Bernstein, D. M. (2018).

RECONSTRUCTING THE PAST. In P. TORTELL, M. TURIN, & M. YOUNG (Eds.),
Memory (pp. 147–154). Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies.
https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvbtzpfm.20

REDMAN, J. C. S. (2010). How Accurate Are Eyewitnesses? Bauckham and the Eyewitnesses
in the Light of Psychological Research. Journal of Biblical Literature, 129(1), 177–197.
https://doi.org/10.2307/27821012

Koessler, S., Engler, H., Riether, C., & Kissler, J. (2009). No Retrieval-Induced Forgetting Under

Stress. Psychological Science, 20(11), 1356–1363. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40575193

Kuehn, L. L. (1974). Looking down a Gun Barrel: Person Perception and Violent Crime.

Perceptual and Motor Skills, 39(3), 1159–1164. https://doi.org/10.2466/pms.1974.39.3.1159

Marr, C., Otgaar, H., Sauerland, M., Quaedflieg, C. W. E. M., & Hope, L. (2021). The

effects of stress on eyewitness memory: A survey of memory experts and

laypeople. Memory & cognition, 49(3), 401–421. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-

020-01115-4

Havard, C., Memon, A., & Humphries, J. E. (2017). The own-race bias in child and

adolescent witnesses: Evidence from video line-ups. International Journal of

Police Science & Management, 19(4), 261–272.

https://doi.org/10.1177/1461355717731579

Morgan, C. A., 3rd, Hazlett, G., Doran, A., Garrett, S., Hoyt, G., Thomas, P., Baranoski, M.,

& Southwick, S. M. (2004). Accuracy of eyewitness memory for persons encountered

during exposure to highly intense stress. International journal of law and psychiatry,

27(3), 265–279. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijlp.2004.03.004