In a fascinating series of Twitter updates, Megan McArdle discusses the inherent problems we encounter when we depend on eyewitness testimony, especially long after the event. This is a long series of separate entries starting with this one:
It’s heartwarming to see all these journalists and twitterers who never did anything morally wrong in high school.
I mean, most of the high school students I knew were pretty much selfish and immoral herd beasts. But maybe things were different elsewhere.
[Responding to a comment from @jbouie] No, just saying that it’s not really backed up. You and I both know what the quality of eyewitness evidence is when given . . . immediately, and by the time it’s 50 years old and delivered in re a presidential election . . . the Swift Boaters had more . . . eyewitnesses who corroborated that Kerry was “lying”. Wouldn’t exactly be surprised to find that those who remember . . . Romney as ringleader were maybe not planning to vote for Mitt Romney.
I don’t think they’re lying as much as motivated cognition plus memory from 50 years ago is not reliable. Dito swiftboaters.
I don’t even think that’s only explanation; just think I can’t reliably distinguish from “they’re remembering accurately”
Note: I actually watched lots of formerly bullied girls become bullies themselves in girls’ camp when social dynamic of cabin . . . shifted for some reason. In most cases difference between bullied and bullies was group support/encouragement, not . . . some fundamental difference in their character. I never saw a bullied girl turn down the opportunity to bully someone else.
[. . .]
[in response to @pjdoland] I am sure that many of my bullies have forgotten it. I don’t think they’re sociopaths. I think they’re humans who grew up.
All the research on memory shows that it’s incredibly unreliable, and very easy to create factitious memories . . . that seem perfectly real. The odds that either Kerry or the Swift Boat vets accurately recalled what happened are zero.
And people who come out of the woodwork decades later with memories that impeach a presidential candidate are almost . . . certainly, either individually or as a group, altering those memories in ways that help the candidate they like.
. . . or they are embellishing memories. Seriously, this is a huge problem with eyewitness testimony, particularly in old trials.
If you tell people what happened, they will report it as if they recall it–they will in fact recall it.
A personal example: my mother was in hospital for an undiagnosed abdominal ailment that turned out to be appendicitis.
I spent the worst 13 hours of my life in the ER with her and would have sworn that it was seared—seared!–into my memory.
But as it happened, I kept a record of what was happening in RT, in case I wanted to write about it. (Fucking journalists, right?)
Three weeks later, I’d forgotten most of the stuff on the list. Some of it came back to me when I read it.
Some of it I still have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about. (I googled snoring? Why?) Memory is not what we think.
It’s a narrative that is constantly being recreated as we tell it, not a record.
The malleability of memory is something that none of us particularly want to face up to: we like to think of ourselves as reliable witnesses to our own lives, yet the evidence is that we are very much not. Some of us are a bit better at accurate recollection, while others consciously remember things as they should have happened instead of how they actually happened.
This, of course, should require us to move the entire “history” section over into the “fiction” part of the mental library…
