What Psychologists Know and Believe about Memory: A Survey of Practitioners (original) (raw)
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Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology, 2019
In criminal cases involving eyewitness reports, psychologists or psychiatrists may be recruited as expert witnesses to help triers of facts to evaluate eyewitness statements, on the assumption that psychologists and psychiatrists are real experts, familiar with scientific progress about how memory works. But are they knowledgeable concerning the science of memory? We assessed the knowledge about eyewitness memory of experts from France and Norway, countries having different legal systems, that is: inquisitorial and adversarial, respectively. We reanalysed the results of a Norwegian psychologists and psychiatrists survey and compared the results with survey data of a sample of French psychologists and psychiatrists serving as judicial experts. The French sample performed inferior relative to the Norwegian sample. More precisely, discrepancies in correct answers were found on seven critical items related to both experimental and clinical psychology. Such weaknesses in the knowledge about memory are briefly discussed with regards to psychological education and to legal systems.
Psychology, Crime & Law, 2014
Expert witnesses have various tasks that frequently include issues of memory. We tested if expert witnesses outperform other practitioners on memory issues of high relevance to clinical practice. We surveyed psychiatrists and psychologists who reported serving as expert witnesses in court (n = 117) about their knowledge and beliefs about human memory. The results were compared to a sample of psychiatrists and psychologists who had never served as expert witnesses (n = 819). Contrary to our expectations, the professionals serving as expert witnesses did not outperform the practitioners who never served. A substantial minority of the respondents harbored scientifically unproven ideas of human memory on issues such as the memory of small children, repression of adult traumatic memories, and recovered traumatic childhood memories. We conclude that the expert witnesses are at risk of offering bad recommendations to the court in trials where reliability of eyewitness memory is at stake.
Scientific study of witness memory: Implications for public and legal policy
Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 1995
The legal system relies heavily on human memory. Crime investigations, criminal trials, and many civil trials depend on memory to reconstruct critical events from the past. Getting at the "truth" is often synonymous with establishing the who, what, when, and how of some prior episode. Past events tend to leave traces, and the process of reconstructing events from the past is aided by various types of trace evidence. These traces can be physical, such as a footprint, a blood stain, or a fingerprint. An event can also leave traces of a somewhat different type, namely memory traces. Although these traces can also be said to have a physical property, in the sense that there exists a biological residue for the event somewhere in the brain, they cannot be observed directly by crime investigators or triers of fact. Instead, the memory trace that resides within the human brain is manifested for investigators and triers of fact through verbal testimony. It is probably safe to conclude that courts of law could not function without relying on human memory. Even physical evidence, such as a bloody glove, requires someone to take the witness stand and recall where it was found, by whom, at what time, in what condition, and so on. The scientific study of human memory was initiated over 100 years ago by Hermann Ebbinghouse (1885/1913), and the scientific study of human memory today remains almost exclusively the province of psychology and related cognitive and neurological sciences. The scientific study of memory is so fundamental to psychology that no general textbook in psychology could fail to devote a chapter or its equivalent to memory. Over the last 20 years or so, psychologists have developed a specific research literature on witness testimony. This research has been directed primarily at eyewitnesses, such as victims or bystanders to a criminal event. This issue of Psychology, Public Policy, and Law is devoted to the potential contributions of the scientific study of witness testimony to public policy and legal issues. Making policy or procedure recommendations to the criminal justice system on eyewitness reliability issues is not new for psychologists. Nearly 90 years ago, Hugo Munsterberg (1908) argued that "Nearly every chapter and sub-chapter of sense psychology may help to clear up the chaos and confusion which prevail in the observation of witnesses" (p. 33), and he bemoaned the fact that juries and judges are not obliged to know and understand these things. Following a long period of near dormancy on the issue, research programs in psychology arose again in the mid-1970s, and there has been a renewal of the argument that scientific psychology has something important to offer the legal system. Unlike Munsterberg, who tried to rely almost exclusively on basic findings and theories of sensation and perception, modern researchers on eyewitness issues have made heavy use of complex stimulus
Canadian journal of psychiatry. Revue canadienne de psychiatrie, 2015
We examine the evidence concerning what people believe about memory. We focus on beliefs regarding the permanence of memory and whether memory can be repressed and accurately recovered. We consider beliefs about memory among the undergraduate and general population, mental health professionals, judges, jurors, and law enforcement officers to provide a broad canvass that extends to the forensic arena, as well as to psychiatry, psychology, and allied disciplines. We discuss the implications of these beliefs for the education of the general public and mental health professionals regarding the science and pseudoscience of memory and the use of suggestive procedures in psychotherapy.
Expert Witnesses, Dissociative Amnesia, and Extraordinary Remembering
Psychological Injury and Law, 2019
Brand et al.’s (2018) response—as well as previous works by some of the authors—reveal a recurrent and concerning picture of using lengthy, but flawed, arguments to promote the concept of dissociative amnesia. Our focus here is not so much on the weak-to-moderate correlation between measures of trauma and dissociation—we concentrate more on the weak evidence for dissociative amnesia. If triers of fact accept there is a correlation between trauma and feeling depersonalized or experiencing memory errors, we foresee relatively few legal consequences. However, if the leap is made to accept that trauma causes dissociative amnesia (or dissociative identity disorder) then it opens the door to repressed memory testimony being trusted in the courtroom, which in the past has had negative consequences. The problem with the concept and theory of dissociative amnesia is that there is an easy-to-miss claim of extraordinary remembering that contradicts findings and theories in memory research. Incorrect beliefs in such extraordinary remembering that can have severe repercussions in court. We document some areas of agreement with Brand et al., but reiterate that there is a lack of evidence for the mechanisms proposed in dissociative amnesia.
Foibles of Witness Memory for Traumatic/High Profile Events
Journal of Air Law and Commerce, 2001
in Atlanta. Currently, she teaches psychology at the University of Nevada, Reno. Dr. Davis is also president of Sierra Trial and Opinion Consultants, a firm offering jury selection services, mock jury research, graphic design and production, among others. Dr. Davis serves as an expert witness on memory, and on issues of consent in sexual assault cases. ** Dr. William C. Folette received his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Washington in 1984 with special training in clinical quantitative, and physiological psychology. He is currently an associate professor in the Department of Psychology and research associate professor in Family and Community Medicine at the University of Nevada. Dr. Follette conducts research in psychotherapy development, research design and methodology, clinical and functional assessment, and clinical behavior analysis.
Impact of expert testimony on the believability of repressed memories
Violence and victims, 1997
Research suggests that people question the believability of trial testimony based on an alleged victim's previously repressed memories. Participants read one of six scenarios depicting the trial of a man accused of sexually assaulting a young girl. The alleged victim either reported the assault immediately (child witness) or waited 20 years to report it (adult witness). In the adult witness condition, the woman's memory for the event had either been repressed until recently or had always been available, and expert testimony was offered on behalf of the defense, the prosecution, both, or neither. Regression analyses revealed that women perceived the accuser's testimony as more believable and the defendant's testimony as less believable than men did. Similarly, the belief in the accuser's testimony decreased and the belief in the defendant's testimony increased when the accuser was an adult in contrast to a child, and when the defense offered expert testimony i...
Eyewitness testimony after three months: A field study on memory for an incident in everyday life
Japanese Psychological Research, 1996
There are cases when one is asked to give testimony about an incident that was of no significance until a certain point in time, after which it suddenly became important Based upon a real case in which a salesclerk gave eyewitness testimony and identified a suspect from a photograph 4 months after the sale, we studied the accuracy of memory for such an incident in everyday life in natural settings Eighty-six salesclerks served as subjects A confederate (customer) visited a store and bought some goods from a clerk Three months later, the clerk was asked to remember the person (customer) and the event (the sales exchanges), and to identify a photograph of the customer Half the subjects remembered the details of the person and the event and, of these, two-thirds were accurate However, although two-thirds of the subjects claimed to identify the customer from a photograph, only 13% were accurate Correlational analyses showed that the quantity (duration of the contact) as well as the quality (the clerk's impression of unusualness of the customer, etc) predicted accuracy of memory