Unfair (16 page)

Imagine that I'm a sketch artist and tell me about the man who appears on the front of the ten-dollar bill—without looking, of course.

Is his hair, curly, wavy, or straight? Does it cover his ears? Does he have a dimple in his chin? Is he wearing a bow tie? Are his eyebrows bushy? Does his jacket have a small collar or a big collar? What type of nose does he have? And, finally, what is his name?

Now turn to
this page
and take a look at the man on the bill. How close did you come?

For many of you, this task was extremely difficult, but it could have been much worse. I could have asked you about the signatures that appear to the left and right of Alexander Hamilton's neck, or about what appears on the reverse side of the bill.

We don't generally take notice of elements in our field of vision if we aren't focused on them. The details of Hamilton's face are largely irrelevant to our use of the ten-dollar bill. When we pull one out, our attention is on completing a purchase; all we need to know is that it's a ten in our hand and not a five, a one, or a twenty. It doesn't matter how many times we've seen it or even how important it is. Indeed, we sometimes overlook things that are critical to our lives.

In one study, researchers found that only 24 percent of the faculty, staff, and students with offices in the Psychology Department building at UCLA recalled the location of the nearest fire extinguisher—despite the fact that each extinguisher was clearly visible and no more than 25 feet away. Many of the people in the building had been exposed to them every day for years, but that didn't matter.
The fire extinguishers were not germane to their day-to-day goals and experiences.

On the bright side, when we are encouraged to pay attention to something, our memories tend to oblige.
When the experimenters returned to the UCLA office building two months later and asked the same participants about the location of the nearest fire extinguisher, everyone knew, because the earlier interaction had brought the location of the bright red objects to the forefront. The
challenge for criminal witnesses is that many times the relevance of an object or person does not become clear until well after the incident. We are much less likely to remember the idling van and the bearded passerby if we have no reason to note them at the time.

Imagine, though, a situation in which you are aware that you should make a mental note of everything around you—say, you witness a brutal assault in an alley. Unfortunately, even then our memories do not perform as we expect them to.
They lack the permanence of photographs or videotapes; over time, we simply lose the ability to recall a lot of what we experienced. And the process is rarely uniform.
We
tend to be best at remembering the gist of what happened (two men were arguing, and the tall one picked up a pipe and hit the short one in the head) and are much less successful in remembering verbatim details (the tall man said, “You told Bill to leave the money in the cellar”).
The specifics are also the fastest to slip away, with the exact words of a conversation being particularly delicate.
Events that elicit strong emotion—like violent crimes—may enhance our memory of the core essence of what transpired while leaving us unable to remember many of the surrounding facts: Did the tall man have a backpack? Was anyone waiting in a car along the street by the alley? Were there any lights on in the building across the street? These are often the very details that allow investigators to solve crimes.

The trouble with relying on memory is not just that we fail to encode certain things or that we forget over time, but also that our memories record what we encounter through the lens of our motivations, expectations, and experiences.
As a result, two people will not have exactly the same memory of the same event.

And once formed, memories are far from immutable. They are subject to revision, alteration, and reconfiguration.
Memory is a constructive process perhaps best likened to creating a collage: we piece together various fragments and then fill in the inevitable white patches with our background knowledge, desires, and beliefs until we have something that is complete and usable.
When we go to retrieve a memory, we are not simply rummaging through an old filing cabinet for a snapshot; as we search, we may in fact be arranging the image.

The malleability of our memories has been documented in a number of experiments, including one in which participants were shown either an iconic image of the 1989
Tiananmen Square protest in Beijing (
this page
, left) or a doctored image of the same scene (
this page
, right).
The alteration of the photograph affected people's reported memories about the event: those who saw the doctored image recalled the protests as much larger than did those who viewed the original photograph.

Presented with new information about an event, we may readily incorporate it into what we remember.
We can even remember things that we never experienced or saw.
One study found that
40 percent of British participants reported having seen footage of a bus exploding during the 2005 London terrorist attacks, although no such footage existed, and 35 percent of that group recounted particular details from the imaginary video.
Contrary to what we'd expect, false memories are often highly specific, which makes them all the more believable both to the people who carry them and to third parties (including police officers, jurors, and judges).

In most cases, our false memories are not made out of whole cloth but are instead logical extensions of what we would expect or want to have happened. We may remember having expressed doubt to a colleague about a project that eventually failed or recall hearing slurred speech from someone who got into a drunk-driving accident later that evening. Conjuring these memories provides us with a narrative that makes sense and affirms what we want to believe.

If we look across experimental studies, people's recollections of events are about 80 percent accurate.
Put differently, roughly every fifth detail is false.
But the problem is not just that we remember events mistakenly; it is also that we do so with great surety—one study showed that a quarter of inaccurate memories were given with total confidence. The victim who identified John Jerome White, remember, was “almost certain” he was her attacker.

How did she get things so wrong? Some of the reasons are obvious in retrospect.
She was seventy-four years old and not wearing her glasses when she was attacked.
The only light came from the closet in an adjoining room.
And before leaving, the perpetrator gave her a pillow and told her, “Hold this to your face until I get out.”
Research shows that a witness's eyesight and age, the viewing duration and distance, and the lighting all play a role in whether a memory is encoded accurately.

But many of the findings are less intuitive.
For instance, one study showed that a person's identification of someone they saw
under full moonlight was only as accurate as flipping a coin—which is to say, not at all. And, overall, the factors that play a role in our encoding of a memory are much more influential than we'd imagine.
Simply by altering the conditions in which a witness viewed a person, researchers were able to boost identification accuracy to 86 percent or drop it to 14 percent.

The legal system amplifies the problem by treating many of these important variables as entirely irrelevant.
In White's case, for example, one source of the victim's misidentification may have been that the victim was white and her attacker was black.
Research suggests that people are 50 percent more likely to make an error in identifying a person from another race, although individuals who have a lot of contact with the other race tend to be more accurate.
The same is true of identifying someone of a different age. But because of its commitment to nondiscrimination, the law generally doesn't acknowledge or address this reality—and most police officers, judges, and jurors don't even know it's an issue.

Researchers have also shown that our memories can be affected by mental or physical stress. It's difficult to simulate the fear and anxiety associated with being the victim of a real crime, but scientists have gotten creative, drawing upon other experiences that may generate similar feelings.
In one study, for example, participants were taken on the “Horror Labyrinth” tour of the London Dungeon, in which they passed through a dark maze with a screaming skeleton, frightening music, disorienting mirrors, and an actor in a dark robe who blocked the path of visitors.
Participants who did not find the experience distressing were more than four times better at identifying the actor out of a nine-person lineup than those who reported high levels of anxiety and had increased heart rates.

So, when a criminal uses a gun in a robbery, it doesn't just encourage his victim to comply; it also makes it less likely that she'll remember his face. There is more to it, though, than generalized fear; our poor memory also comes down to where our attention is
drawn during a holdup (remember the ten-dollar bill).
When a weapon is aimed at us, it tends to dominate the scene, and if our eyes are glued to the barrel, we are going to struggle to identify the suspect later on.

Our memories may also be compromised by significant physical exertion, as when a victim fights off an attacker or a cop chases down a suspect.
In one simulation study, police officers who punched and kicked a three-hundred-pound hanging bag to the point of exhaustion were far less successful at memory tasks than officers who remained idle.
Not only did they struggle to recall briefing materials they had received beforehand, but they were also half as likely to correctly identify a suspect they encountered after hitting the bag.

This seems backwards—we would expect that fighting off an attacker would make us
better
at remembering that person, but that's just not the case.
One implication is that when police officers and other witnesses make errors in recalling particular details after a strenuous encounter with a criminal, we need to resist our gut instinct that they are lying or trying to protect the perpetrator.
It's likely that they just don't remember.