By Rachel Eaton
Do you remember your boyfriend insulting your mother but he swears he did not, well then, he may be suffering from a case of ‘false memory’.
According to Healthline “A false memory is a recollection that seems real in your mind but is fabricated in part or in whole”.
So, what does that actually mean?
Well, according to Bartlett’s Theory of Reconstructive Memory, we remember things in fragments, and then reconstruct them into a full memory when we want to recall them. Bartlett displayed how false memories occur through his ‘War of the Ghosts’ study. In this study participants recalled the story differently, as they reconstructed the fragments of the story adding different information. Therefore, they displayed false memories.
So how is this dismantling trust in the legal system?
Well, a big con of false memory is that it can impact the legitimacy of eyewitness testimonies in court. For example, a witness could have seen a man wearing a blue coat and white shoes shoplifting, but in court may relay that the culprit was not wearing a coat and had Crocs on. This is because the witness reconstructed the memory falsely, instead including fragments of information from another memory, when they saw a man wearing Crocs doing their weekly shop in Tesco.
'We remember things in fragments and then reconstruct them into a full memory when we want to recall them.'
Loftus added to this phenomenon in her car crash experiment. Loftus and Palmer showed a car accident scene to two groups. One group was asked how fast the cars were going when they ‘hit’ each other and the other group was asked how fast the cars were going when they ‘smashed’ each other.
When asked if a window was broken in the accident, 32% of the ‘smash’ group said yes, whereas only 14% of the other group said yes. In fact, no glass was broken in the accident, so that suggests that they falsely reconstructed the fragments of information based on assumptions given to them.
Therefore, witnesses can be influenced by assumptions or expectations, so this impacts the accuracy of testimonies in legal cases. As a result, it could lead to innocent people being imprisoned or guilty people walking free, in the most extreme cases of false memories in court.
So, ‘false memories’ really can decrease trust in the legal system, but how can we solve this? Well, nowadays, courts are using multiple witnesses and cross-examining testimonies, to decrease the impact of false memories. So, there is no need to worry about the world going corrupt because people’s memories are faulty, but remember, you aren’t always right.
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