Should Eyewitnesses Be Trusted? Interventions Aimed at Decreasing The Fabrication of False Memories in Legal Context

Abstract

The criminal justice system relies heavily on eyewitness testimony. However, research has suggested that memory is malleable and quite vulnerable to change after initial encoding. This experiment tested the effect of two interventions in reducing the rate of false memories in eyewitness testimony interrogations. The goal of this experiment was to determine how interviewees’ perception of the interviewer influences their memory. This occurred through two separate interventions that were compared to a control condition. Fifty-one participants viewed photographs of a car robbery. After completing a primary distractor task, participants saw the photographs again, but some of the photographs presented misinformation. The participants were randomly assigned to one of three groups (including the control condition). Participants in the control condition were not given any information about the interview. Participants in condition B, the low scrutiny group, were told that the interviewer had accurate information about the event, but had not seen the photographs. Participants in condition C, the high scrutiny group, were told that the interviewer had seen the photographs and studied them carefully. The control condition was pretested to produce false memories for approximately 10-15% of the items. Depending on which group they were assigned to, participants experienced different perceptions of the interviewer that might influence, for better or worse, their memory recall. We hypothesized that condition C would yield the lowest rate of false memories. Although the data was not statistically significant, the results revealed a paradoxical trend. The cause of the pattern is unclear, but it is suggests that an interviewer’s knowledge may alter the memory of eyewitnesses in some manner. Future research with greater statistical power may yield more significant results.