| There
is little or no relationship
between witness confidence and
witness accuracy. Memory
Confidence affects the decisions
of juries.
Mock Juries
Circumstantial
evidence
18% conviction rate, just on
circumstantial evidence
then add one eye witness, the
conviction rate goes up to 72%
In a picture line-up, even without the
perpetrator, the victim will still pick someone.
Later with a second line-up with the
perpetrator, the witness will stay with their original
choice instead of picking the real perpetrator.
| Elizabeth
Loftus |
Paradigm - model for
research.
|
She studies memory and has the view that repressed
memories are unlikely because the primary cause
of forgetting is not repression; rather it is
due to other factors (e.g., interference, decay)
and not because we want
to forget the event/memory.
|
To explain why people believe in memories that
never existed, she developed a paradigm in which
she implants the memory of being lost in a shopping
mall in people (young adults) who were never
lost in a mall.
|
She has found that she is able to implant the
memory in some of participants in her study.
She argues that a similar process may occur
in some sexual abuse cases. Memories of sexual
abuse may be implanted by the therapist. For
example, the therapist may say:
|
"are you sure that you weren’t
sexually abused, you may be suppressing these
feelings. That would explain why you are having
such problems."
|
After analyzing transcripts of therapy sessions,
she noted that some therapists suggest memories
to the clients in a way that may be very conducive
to forming false memories.
|
|
