reliability of eye-witness accounts

An off-shoot from another thread began thusly: Schrafinator: Actually, the reason eyewitness accounts are now known to be generally ureliable is through our increasing understanding of how the brain deals with memory.It used to be thought that memories were kind of like video tapes, but we now understand that all memories are reconstructions of events. Also, memory is very plastic and maleable and memories are often manipulated and greatly affected by our emotional state, personal prejudices and biases.It is not through any "degeneration" that we don't put as much stock in eyewitness accounts as we used to, but because science has increased our understanding.Let me ask you this;Do you accept the use of DNA evidence in crime investigations and criminal trials?If so, if the DNA of someone identified by a witness, or many witnesses, as being the perpetrator of a crime does not match the DNA gathered at the crime scene, would you ignore the DNA evidence in favor of the witness accounts?There have been many cases of people being exonerated by DNA evidence even though the witnesses are ABSOLUTELY POSITIVE that they correctly identified their rapist or mugger.Coffee House?

One of my husband's fellow graduate students (she has since begun her post Doctorate stint) used to teach a section on memory and eye-witness accounts in her Cognition and Perception undergraduate course.One day, she had Jim come into her class in the middle of a lecture, tell her something, hand her something, and then leave.She then had the students answer several basic questions about what they saw, such as what he did, a basic physical description, what he was wearing, etc.It was amazing how inaccurate many of them were. One even had him wearing glasses, which he has never worn.Has anyone here ever read anything by Elizabeth Loftus? She's the researcher who did some great work on implanting false memories in people. She caught a lot of heat with the "recovered memory of childhood abuse" proponents for making the mere suggestion that some of these memories of abuse could be false.abe:I just thought of an excellent example of a false memory in a person.A while ago I was working at the shop and a woman came in asking where a certain product was. I told her that I was sorry, but that we didn't carry that particular product at the moment. She disagreed with me and told me that she bought it right here about a month ago and she even told me exactly where in the store and on which shelf it was displayed on. I moved on in the conversation and apologized that we didn't have it today, of course, not wanting to argue with her.I have worked in that store for nearly seven years, and have been assigned to that particular section for the last 4 years, and we have never had that product in the store to the best of my memory. Since I actually am involved in the purchasing of product for that section in these last 4 years and I have been stocking the shelves and creating displays in that section for those 4 years, and I conferred with all of the other people who purchase product for my entire department, I was quite confident that we didn't have it in the store at the last month.This woman had created a false memory, right down to inventing a memory of exactly which shelf the product was displayed in the shop.Furthermore, she was 100% SURE that her memory was accurate, even though she knew she was talking to the people who actually work there every day, for years, order the product, and stock it on the shelves, while she hadn't been in there for over a month.Fascinating, but tricky to deal with from a customer service standpoint.This message has been edited by schrafinator, 02-28-2005 08:14 AM

I read that thread, it was short but good, and definitely related to this one.

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The point was only that many witnesses are better than one, for that very reason, that one witness may not be reliable.

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This is true.

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A number of witnesses rarely all agree with each other on all points, but from the multiple testimonies you can construct a better likelihood of the reality than with one.

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This is also true, but the point is that witness testimony has been demonstrated to be very unreliable, even though people generally consider it extremely compelling and convincing.Also, multiple witness reports are only more reliable than single reports inasmuch as each witness does not talk to each other, the interviewer does not ask them leading or biased questions, etc.Many dozens of independent witnesses gave consistent testimony of the "monkey man" in India, and the Loch Ness Monster in Scotland, but there's not a shred of evidence to suggest that either is real.

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This is also why we have twelve jurors in a criminal case, the more the better for the sake of justice.

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Well, yes and no.The idea behind multiple jurors is that a group of people is more likely to have different viewpoints and think about evidence in disparate ways.Of course, groupthink is as much an issue with juries as it is with any other group.The other issue is that juries are meant to evaluate evidence, which is not at all the same as repeating testimony of something they saw or heard.

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Besides being wrong, witnesses may lie, and it's also possible for multiple witnesses to lie, as they did in the trial of Jesus Christ.

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Yes, they did lie in that story, and in real trials it is certainly possible for all the participants to lie....which means that you have contradicted your original point; that multiple witnesses should be taken as reliable evidence of an event.

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But in that case DNA couldn't prove whether he claimed he was going to destroy and raise the temple or not, now could it? In other words, some cases can't be decided by any means OTHER than witnesses.

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Look, either you are talking about Bible stories, OR you are talking about our modern criminal justice system.In our modern times, unless there is good physical, forensic evidence, people suspected of crimes are often not prosecuted due to insufficient evidence.

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Again, such unreliability is implied in the Biblical requirement of two or more.

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...except it assumes that witnesses are reliable at all (they are demonstrated to be very unreliable), and makes no mention of physical evidence being more reliable, or important at all.

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But in this case you're talking about what are usually single-witness situations that need corroborating evidence in any case.

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All cases involving any number of witnesses need corroborating physical or forensic evidence if they are to not be on shaky grounds.

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IN other words, DNA evidence changes nothing about the Biblical rule. It's a great tool that wasn't available to previous generations, but it doesn't change the fact that three witnesses are better than one in a situation where all you have is witness evidence. DNA may disqualify some witnesses and agree with others in any case -- witnesses are not ALWAYS wrong after all.

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But if ALL you have is witness evidence, it is unlikely that you really have a good grasp of what happened, and I certainly wouldn't want to make a decision about someone's future based upon only that.

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Yes, this is kind of what I was getting at about our degenerated times where witnesses are either less trustworthy or less trusted and the wisdom it takes to determine trustworthiness seems to be in shorter supply, but that's just my own private musing.

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No, the point is that eyewitness testimony is always less reliable and likely always has been.This is because of the way the human brain deals with memory. Like I said, memory does not work as a video tape, but as a reconstruction which is highly suceptable to suggestion and manipulation and error.If we put much more emphasis upon forensic and physical evidence and much less upon eyewitness accounts is a sign that we are moving towards a more just and rational way of investigating crimes.

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Yes it does assume that witnesses CAN be reliable, and to assume the opposite, that they are always UNreliable, which seems to be the current position, or at least your position, is awfully cynical and strange too. If nobody is to be trusted at all, civilization might as well give up.

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It's not about being "trustworthy" in the sense of being honest.Most people do report what they saw or heard in a completely truthful way.It's about the nature of memory.Memory is "good enough" to be useful in daily life, but it is demonstrated to be very unreliable in reconstructing specific events accurately, especially when confusion or heightened emotions or personal biases are at play.

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I would venture the guess that if this had always been the attitude, no legal system could ever have arisen in the entire world until modern forensics came about, as witnesses have always been the mainstay of law.

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Obviously this is not the case.Physical evidence has always been believed.If a witness sees Nigel carrying a goat with Omar's brand on it, and then the goat is found in Nigel's herd with an alteration to it's brand that is fresh, this represents lots of physical evidence which corroborates the eyewitness account.The point is, isn't it great that we live in these enlightened times where we have a greater understanding of how memory works, so we are able to take it into account, and recognize our own falability?This way, we are less likely to wrongly accuse, imprison, or worse?

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Maybe, or it could mean that we are degenerating morally overall so that witness integrity is actually less reliable than it used to be and it's a good thing we have sophisticated forensics. Not something that could be proved but something I suspect may be the case. One of those private musings again.

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Is the fact that the human brain is susceptible to optical illusions a sign that we are morally degenerating too?

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This is where personal integrity plays a big part though. If people's judgments of what they witnessed are as easily swayed as some of these studies show, I think that is about integrity more than anything natural about memory.

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Uh, no, not really.Is someone who experiences an optical illusion effect lacking in integrity when they tell you what they see, or are they being truthful but their brain is fooling them?

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I think people today have less solid standards of honesty so that emotions and biases and external influences more easily compromise their view of things.

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Does someone who experiences an optical illusion on a less solid standard of honesty?Emotions and biases and external influences have been pretty much the sole, or at least the main, basis for human views for millenia. Religious thought and dogma, which is nothing if it isn't the group manifestation of emotion, bias and external influence, completely ruled the cultures of the world until science and rational thought eventually was able to gain a foothold a few hundred years ago.But I will actually agree that people in the US these days, even in our technological, high-tech age, are generally more susceptible to fuzzy, irrational thinking, because we have had such a anti-intellectual, anti-critical thought, pro-blind allegience climate.However, let me qualify that by saying that logical thinking is not at all natural for humans. Human biases and thought errors and communal reinforcements are what enabeled us to survive early in our existence.

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Now don't totalize what I'm saying here. This is another personal musing on a possible trend, just something I think may be the case that would be just about impossible to prove.

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Why do you think this is the case, though? Based upon what evidence?

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Of course physical evidence has a part when it's available, but it isn't always. Would you be less like to cavil and object if I hadn't said "mainstay" (which is not synonymous with "only kind of evidence" by the way), but something vaguer like "an important part of" the law? "Mainstay" doesn't rule out other kinds of evidence.

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"Mainstay" implies "main", as in "most used".Correct?

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Sure, but the Biblical standard DOES take into account human fallibility, that's the whole point of requiring more than one witness.

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You have been challenging this very simple obvious statement but that simple obvious statement still stands.

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Well, that is true, but that is very weak as some kind of accolade for the Bible. More than one witness does not hurt, but it doesn't particularly help with regards to reliability.The people who wrote the Bible clearly thought that eye witnesses were very important, but we now know that eyewitnesses are not all that useful.

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this is from the other thread you didn't reply to.
Can you (personally) tell when to trust your eyes and when not to?

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Actually, I did reply.I said that I did not always trust my eyes.In day to day life, the stakes are low, so I generally trust that the apple that I bought at the store which is sitting on the table three feet away is, indeed, an apple.

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Can you cite an example in life of when you didn't trust your own eyes?

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Sure.When driving on the interstate highways, it is common to see all manner of stuff on the side of the road. My persomal tendency, however, is to see them all as some kind of dead animal. Sometimes they are dead animals, but sometimes I totally think they are dead animals until I get close enough to see that it is a piece of dirty carpet or a mound of earth.It's not just that I think they might be dead animals; I am sure they are dead animals, and I'm always surprised when I see that it isn't an animal at all.

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You've seen what you remember right? I don't see a difference.

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Once, There was an accident at a farm I worked at in which a horse kicked a woman when she was out in the field with them.I there was a lawsuit resulting from the accident, and I had to give a deposition several years later regarding the invident.One of the reasons the woman was in the field was because one of the horses had a leadrope still attached to his halter which was a danger to him and needed to be removed.I recalled very vividly a certain one of the horses running around with a leadrope swinging from his halter. I could (and still can) picture him, his tail streaming out behind him, his knees and hocks lifted really high.The thing is, I never saw that. The horse with the leadrope still attached to him was actually a totally different horse. Different color, different way of moving, everything.So, no what you remember isn't always what you actually see.

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Do you not recognize when things you remember might not have happened? And I know you don't but sometimes you do and memories that are questionable are usually trivial.

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There have been more than a few cases of people being exonerated from rape charges after being very confidently identified as the attacker by the rape victim herself, except that the DNA evidence of semen collected was not possibly a match to his.Anything but trivial, wouldn't you say?

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Well thats not what I really meant but since I asked that question exactly how you answered it it's my fault.
I kind of meant any typeof miraculous happenings or in some way you doubted what you believe because of a memory you had which you were doubting.

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Ah, I see.Actually, I don't see.Can you restate this question in a clearer way.I am afraid I do not understand.

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How did you figure out that wasn't true, what you were seeing? How did you figure out that wasn't true, what you were seeing?

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One of the lawyers at that deposition read a statement from the woman who was kicked, and the whole reason she was going into the field was to get the leadrope off of one of the horses, but a different one from the one who kicked her.I forgot that detail and constructed a false memory of which horse had the leadrope on it.

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To the law no but to the girl I hope yes. What if she didn't get a good glance at the attacker. There are many variables you would have to know toreally answer that question.

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Here's some more specific examples:memory - The Skeptic's Dictionary - Skepdic.com This message has been edited by schrafinator, 03-03-2005 10:41 AM

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I absolutely disagree. While we may have made strides in this field of study, do you honestly believe that until only ten or twenty years ago eye witness testimony was considered to be as reliable as a 'video tape?' I don't think so; and, as I suggested, a cursory look at court transcripts or historical texts will give you quite a different impression.

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Remember the hubub surrounding the "recovered memories of childhood abuse" a few years back where people were convicted solely on the basis of victim testimony? Remember the same kind of uproar there was over those Satanic cults which were killing children, complete with trials and convictions, except that those cults never existed?

Yep, it happens, and happens quite often.So, you agree that it is hardly trivial?