My Homework for Your Reading Pleasure

I haven’t had this section in my blog for a while because I haven’t written any interesting papers lately, but I recently wrote one for my sociological enterprise course. The prompt was an open topic about anything that we care about related to sociology, so I chose the unreliability of eyewitness testimonies and titled it “Is Seeing Really Believing?” The word count limit was 500, and my paper ended up being exactly that.

Have you ever been to Disneyland? If so, do you remember experiencing all the rides, seeing all the colors, and meeting all the characters like Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Bugs Bunny, and Pluto? Can you visualize yourself walking up to these characters, hugging them, and shaking their hands (or, in some cases, paws)?

If you answered yes to all of these questions, you just fell victim to deception by memory malleability.

Bugs Bunny would never be found at Disneyland because it’s a Warner Brothers character.

According to a study done by a doctoral candidate at the University of Washington, a simple stimulation of the mind with a fake Disneyland advertisement including an image of Bugs Bunny was enough to create false memories such that over a third of people questioned claimed to have met and made physical contact with Bugs Bunny at Disneyland (as opposed to less than a tenth of people questioned from the control group).

Sure, this is an interesting study that we can laugh at, but it has a much more important underlying significance. What if this person recalling this memory was an eyewitness in a criminal trial, and the future of someone’s life depended on this witness’ reconstruction of his/her memory?

Both in a courtroom and on the streets, “I saw it with my own eyes” is one of the most powerful phrases one can say when trying to convince someone to believe something. Because of our abnormal level of confidence in the idea that seeing is believing, we tend to put an irrational amount of trust in eyewitnesses. The consequences in a situation like the Bugs Bunny experiment aren’t severe, but, obviously, the repercussions in a courtroom are much more extreme when members of a jury place unproportional weight to eyewitness testimonies relative to other more reliable sources of evidence like expert analyses and DNA test results.

How exactly might an eyewitness to a crime get his or her memory of the event changed? Every time a memory is recalled, it gets slightly altered before being rewritten into the mind for restorage. This rewriting process is heavily affected by present personal and social environmental circumstances. For example, a witness may have seen an African-American as the potential suspect for a crime, but originally had some doubts. A few days later, this witness may see a completely different African-American on a breaking news broadcast being convicted of first-degree murder in an unrelated case. As she watches this story, she subconsciously correlates African Americans with crime slightly more than she did before. As this happens, her doubts from the crime she witnessed slowly diminish, and before she knows it, she starts seeing the original African American as definitely guilty.

Because of these severe flaws in eyewitness testimony, I propose that, similar to how the results of polygraph exams are not accepted as valid evidence in many states due to their low rate of reliability, eyewitness testimony also be removed as valid evidence in the court of law.