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Essays on false memories
Essays on false memories
Causes of false memories
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False Memories: Addressing the Malleability of the Human Mind
Each day, an estimated 200 people are accused of criminal activity in the United States alone. In the course of a year, that adds up to roughly 75,000 individuals who have no choice but to take their chances against America’s judicial system. Although the greater majority of that mass could very well be guilty of the alleged crimes, it is important to recognize that thousands of innocent individuals are wrongly accused. The reality of these false accusations is harsh; each year, an unfortunate number of people are imprisoned for crimes that they never committed. In the most inequitable of these cases, innocence becomes subject to incarceration for a crime that never even occurred in the first place. Unless a brain can recall a memory each day with clarity, it relies on confidence as a signal of accuracy to fill in the remaining pieces to create a false testimony.
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Elizabeth Loftus puts the malleability of memory into perspective, and describes the plausible causes of false memory as well as the toll it can take on the innocent. Memories come and go with time, fading away when left untouched just to be penciled in again when revisited days, weeks or even years later – until the next recall. Often times, the details of a memory tend to change and the story can even transform one completely unlike the original. In the 1970’s, Loftus performed a study to analyze the effect that introducing false details about a specific memory to people would have on their recall of that event. Loftus found that when erroneous details about an event were presented to people, their personal recollections of that event became distorted. From these findings, Loftus was able to conclude that human memory is susceptible to manipulation by
If that does not occur to the reader as an issue than factoring in the main problem of the topic where innocent people die because of false accusation will. In addition, this book review will include a brief review of the qualifications of the authors, overview of the subject and the quality of the book, and as well as my own personal thoughts on the book. In the novel Actual Innocence: When Justice Goes Wrong and How to Make It Right authors Barry Scheck, Peter Neufeld, and Jim Dwyer expose the flaws of the criminal justice system through case histories where innocent men were put behind bars and even on death row because of the miscarriages of justice. Initially, the text promotes and galvanizes progressive change in the legal
Memory plays a large role in our legal system. A person who witnesses a crime has to rely on recalling information, which isn’t always completely accurate. In Johnson (1993) paper she discusses ways memory interferes with the legal systems and what rules and regulations help prevent memory failure to interfere.
Although the criminal justice system punishes those who have committed crimes against society, there are still flaws in the system that send innocent people to prison. Actual Innocence by Barry Scheck, Peter Neufeld, and Jim Dwyer, focuses on those problems connected to the incarceration of innocent people, as well as those who have been convicted and were ultimately exonerated. Confessions and racism are two major issues that are described in Actual Innocence that explain how these problems occur in our criminal justice system today and how innocent people are convicted of crimes.
Steffens, M., & Mecklenbräuker, S. (2007). False memories: Phenomena, theories, and implications. Zeitschrift Für Psychologie/Journal Of Psychology, 215(1), 12-24. doi:10.1027/0044-3409.215.1.12
The justice system depends on eyewitness evidence to convict offenders. Eyewitness is a difficult task to achieve in the justice system. According to Wise, Dauphinais, & Safer (2007), in 2002 one million offenders were convicted as felons in America. Out of those one million offenders, 5000 of them were innocent in 2002 (Dauphinais, 2007). The Ohio Criminal Justice survey states that 1 out of 200 felony criminal cases is a wrongful conviction (Dauphinais et al., 2007). According to Dauphinais et al., (2007), Dripps said that eyewitness error is a huge factor in cases of wrong convictions. A study conducted in 1987 indicated that in roughly 80,000 criminal cases, eyewitness error was the only sole evidence against the defendant
Memory is an important and active system that receives information. Memory is made up of three different stages sensory memory, short term memory, and long term memory. According to the power point presentation, sensory memory refers to short storage of memory that allows an individual to process information as it occurs. Short term memory refers to memory that is only available for a limited time. It is information that is held for seconds or sometimes even minutes. Long term memory refers to memory that is stored for a long period of time and it has an unlimited capacity with the ability to hold as much information as possible. Retrieval is key and it allows individuals to have memories. Episodic memory refers to memory for events that we
In class this week we saw cases where our memory fails when recalling information in the past and even seeing changes in real time in front of our eyes. Misinformation is when someone gives information that is incorrect without the intent of giving the incorrect information. This is more likely to happen in situations where the new information would fit someone’s schema of the situation. In a crime example, we can say that a robber has a knife in his hand and pointed it at someone, someone in the situation may have seen a gun instead of the knife and give that as a description. It is the same when someone misreads a word or letter as another in a license plate. It is not on purpose but it is because our brains use shortcuts to link events together to save time. In class we discussed why the new false memory might take hold as if it was the true memory. We said that since the new misinformation was more recent, it would be more easily remembered and projected into the memory. This blocking theory can be used to explain why when someone says they saw a gun at a crime scene to the other witnesses, the other witnesses may be more likely to say that there was a gun and not a knife
One of the main factors in wrongful convictions, tunnel vision, has been recognized by psychologist as a human tendency to quickly convict a suspect so that society feels safe. Although tunnel vision is seen as a natural instinct it can convict innocent individuals and weaken the criminal justice system . Jerome Frank, a judge in the United States Circuit Court of Appeals explored the causes of wrongful convictions and noted that in 36 cases tunnel vision was a significant factor in the conviction of innocent individuals. As demonstrated, tunnel vision is a prevalent factor and may affect cases resulting in judges and juries convicting wrong suspects. However, the human tendency towards tunnel vision is a distinctive feature of an individuals psychological characteristics. Psychologist view tunnel vision as the product of cognitive biases. These natural biases explain why tunnel vision is common even amongst respected legal enforcers and honest justice systems. Although tunnel vision is a common natural tendency, it can be altered and lead to the conviction of innocent individuals.In situations when a high profile case is
In chapter 6 of Unfair, Adam Benforado addresses the issues regarding human being’s poor memory and our justice systems outrageous reliability on eye witness testimony. Benforado believes that our real memories are severely obstructed by the human brains limit in perception. Our brains are not able to recall every moment of every day because there is simply no way to process everything we encounter in a day. Although most science supports the idea that our memories are unreliable and biased, most of us humans believe we have good and accurate memory. We also expect other to be able to perform basic memory task with accuracy and consistency, which is why for years, the United States so desperately depended on eye witness testimony to get a conviction. This desperation over the years has left hundreds, possibility thousands of innocent citizens paying for a crime they did not commit. According to the reading, of the first 250 exonerations in the United States, 190 of them happen to have involved mistaken identification’s
Have you ever been an eyewitness at the scene of a crime? If you were, do you think that you would be able to accurately describe, in precise detail, everything that happened and remember distinct features of the suspect? Many people believe that yes they would be able to remember anything from the events that would happen and the different features of the suspect. Some people, in fact, are so sure of themselves after witnessing an event such as this that they are able to testify that what they think they saw was indeed what they saw. However, using an eyewitness as a source of evidence can be risky and is rarely 100% accurate. This can be proven by the theory of the possibility of false memory formation and the question of whether or not a memory can lie.
In recent years there has been a hot debate between "repressed" vs. "false" memories. Neurobiological studies show that both suppression and recall and the creation of false memories are possible. This paper evaluates the evidence but forth by both sides of the controversy and concludes that both are feasible and separate phenomenon, which occur at significant rates in our society.
False Memories are essentially, unintentional human errors, or a state of none-factual creativeness; which results in persons having declared memories of events and situations that did not occur in the actuality of their own lifespan reality history. If they were not unintentional errors they would be deception, which has the nature of a different purpose, morality and legality. False memories have no authenticity, realness or legitimacy, in the subject’s actual life. However they may not be complete false memories: more likely to be a combination of subjugation of previous memory cue’s; or imaginative inventive production, activated and initiated by an origination of external scenario additive as a prompt, indicator or sign, which fuses into memory recall. Therefore ‘False Memories’ are a genuine but inaccurate remembering of experimental data or recall of an genuine occurrences; both of which have rudiments of accuracy and inaccuracy in their transitive attention, giving most ‘False Memories’ partiality.
Memory is one of the most critical parts of cognition. It is important because it is involved in almost every aspect of cognition including problem solving, decision making, attention, and perception. Because of this importance, people rely on one’s memory to make important decisions. The value of one’s memory in this society is so high that it is used as evidence to either save one’s life or kill one’s life during murder trials. But as many of the cognitive psychologists know, human’s memory can cause many errors. One of these errors is false memory which is either remembering events that never happened or remembering events differently from the actual event. This finding of false memory raised big interests among psychologists and general public and many researches were done in order to find more about the false memory. The constructive approach to memory, which states that memory is constructed by person based on what really happened in addition to person’s other knowledge, experiences, and expectations, supports the idea of false memory. Just like what constructive approach to memory states, the false memory can be created by person’s knowledge, common biases, and suggestions. The present study was done in order to demonstrate one methodology that biases people to create and recall false memories. The present study is based on Deese’s experiment in 1959 and also on Roediger and McDermott’s experiment in 1995. The participants will be presented with sequence of words visually, and then they would have to classify a set of words as either in the sequence or not in the sequence. Our hypothesis is that people will create false memories and recall distractor words that are related to the sequence of words presented significantly m...
The article How to Tell If a Particular Memory Is True or False by Daniel M. Bernstein and Elizabeth F. Loftus, addresses the various techniques used by cognitive scientists and other researchers in hopes of distinguishing true from false memories. For this article Loftus and Bernstein, memory researchers, chose to discuss the different methods currently used, rather than trying to find new ways to tell if a particular memory is true or false. Their findings in these three different approaches are very interesting, and leads us to think critically of the veracity of true and false memories.
Eyewitness testimony is defined as, “an area of research that investigates the accuracy of memory following an accident, crime, or other significant event, and the types of errors that are commonly made in such situations.” Much emphasis is placed on the accuracy of eyewitness testimony as often-inaccurate eyewitness testimony can have serious consequences leading to wrong convictions. Eyewitness testimony is a powerful tool within any field, particularly that of justice, as it is a readily accepted form of evidence that allows for convictions. However, Tests conducted by Loftus have shown an enormous swing from a non-guilty verdict, to guilty within the same case, simply through the introduction of an eyewitness. This alone displays the importance of eyewitness testimony, and accentuates the theory that jurors tend to over believe, or at least rely heavily on such accounts.