Even when we understand that memories can be altered, or even fabricated…the truth is difficult to accept; after all, our memories certainly seem permanent, and we might like to believe that things we have forgotten have merely been mislaid, like old VHS tapes consigned to a box at the back of a closet and covered with old clothes. – “Mind-witness Testimony”
If you haven’t yet read my research paper, “Mind-witness Testimony”, you really ought to; it expands at much greater length and in much greater detail on the themes I discussed in “Imagination Pinned Down” and “I Disbelieve It!”, mocked in “Mulberry Street” and mentioned in passing in “Traffic Jam”, “The Swedish Cult”, “That Old Black Magic”, “Mumbo Jumbo” and many other places. The Reader’s Digest version is:
…The human mind doesn’t passively record events as a camera does; memory is an active and dynamic process which retains information by fitting it into schemata, mental frameworks which shape our thinking and give meaning to perceptions…The same psychological mechanism which causes us to find pictures in Rorschach’s inkblots also causes us to fit memories into the complex web of schemata by which we interpret the world. And just as we ignore those topological elements of a cloud or inkblot which do not fit the meaning our minds have imposed upon it, so do we forget or distort elements of a memory which fail to conform to the schema in which we have embedded it, or even invent elements which were not in reality present, but which the schema predicts should be…The human mind often completely fabricates memories in order to impose conformity with one’s weltanschauung. One simple example involves police lineups: people will often identify the man whom police imply (subtly or overtly) is their preferred suspect because they believe police to be expert assessors of guilt who would never implicate someone falsely, and this schema of police authority and infallibility actually shapes their memories, sometimes to the point of identifying a person who is later proven to look absolutely nothing like the actual criminal…
In witch hunts of both the classic and modern varieties, hypersuggestible people such as children, the mentally ill, the emotionally needy or the severely traumatized can be induced to “remember” all sorts of fantastic things which are not even physically possible, much less grounded in actual events; when they repeat these “memories” in court (or in front of audiences hungry for “sex trafficking” narratives) they are not lying in the strict sense, but merely playing back a script that was written into their memories by processes such as suggestion, group polarization, stereotypic conformation, guided imagination, abusive interrogation tactics and others discussed in my paper. Though the concept of “recovered memory” has been discredited and most reasonably-well-informed people understand its role in driving the Satanic panic, few have yet connected the dots to recognize “sex trafficking” narratives as produced by the same processes. However, as the public begins to recognize the fallibility of human memory, it’s inevitable that outlandish, evidence-free stories such as those told by Somaly Mam, Chong Kim and Theresa Flores will be treated with greater skepticism. And though it’s a slow process, that knowledge is indeed growing; witness, for example, this treatment of a new resurgence of the “Satanic cult abuse” myth:
…two [Scottish] charities…Break the Silence and…Izzy’s Promise, believe satanic [sic] abuse to be rife in Scotland and that it has been for decades. They say children are forced to take part in satanic [sic] rituals involving the sacrifice of babies and the making of snuff movies….it appears highly likely that…these claims are based upon “recovered memories”. As I have written in the past in these pages, the use of various dubious techniques…aimed at recovering allegedly repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse can often produce detailed and horrific false memories. In fact, there is a consensus among scientists studying memory that traumatic events are more likely to be remembered than forgotten, often leading to posttraumatic stress disorder…The sad truth is that we have been here before. [Satanic fantasies of the early ’90s]…were remarkably similar to those now…
Memory, as experts have been trying to teach judges and jurors, does not function like an iPhone camera recording. Memories can not only be deleted; they can be altered or invented without you even realizing it, as shown in a study published last year in the International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, which involved 861 U.S. soldiers enrolled in a survival school. As part of training, they endured abusive interrogations. Afterward, many were shown a photo of someone who looked nothing like their interrogator, and interviewers insinuated that the person depicted was the culprit. Eighty-four percent of the soldiers misidentified their interrogators after being misled, and some also remembered weapons or telephones that never existed. An extensive body of research with similar findings has become increasingly perplexing for the nation’s judicial systems, leading the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to release a sweeping report last month calling for an overhaul of how the courts and law enforcement deal with one of the most powerfully persuasive pieces of evidence that can sway a jury: eyewitness identification. Research has shown that leading questioning or suggestive behavior by psychiatrists, police or acquaintances, as well as accounts in the media, can result in “planting” false memories in the mind of a witness. In some cases, this can lead witnesses to believe they saw incidents that never occurred…Unsettling as it might be to admit it, the mind is really a muddle of distorted memory associations, further complicated by the distracting details of the moment. For most of our country’s judicial history, this understanding has been largely absent from courtrooms, but a string of shocking cases across the world over the past three decades has ushered in debate, discussion and, finally, the revamping of…laws on the issue…
Belief in the infallibility of memories, especially traumatic memories, is deeply ingrained, and prosecutors will not be happy about the replacement of easily-manipulated crime victim testimony with more indelible and objective forms of evidence. But sooner or later, the facts must win and eyewitness testimony uncorroborated by physical evidence will be tossed into the rubbish-bin of history along with trial by ordeal and, one would hope, confessions obtained by torture. Moral panics will periodically bedevil humanity for at least another several thousand years, but perhaps our children’s children will no longer have to endure trials and laws based on nothing but the incredible and unsubstantiated narratives of self-professed victims.
Have you ever watched Kevin Bacon’s movie ‘He Said, She Said’? Basically its a romantic comedy but it shows how the same occurences and events can be perceived differently by different individuals. It does not mean that either of them is lying, only that with time and pressure, our minds tend to subconsciously change and alter certain events to suit our own ego. The truth is almost never as described by one individual or another, but somewhere in between.
Another good example which comes to mind is Winona Ryder’s ‘The Crucible’ where a whole town was convinced some people were worshipping Satan, just because a young angsty girl manipulated some children into believing that they had really SEEN the devil and that it was possessing them. Such is the power of suggestion.
You may be interested to know that Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible near the beginning of the Red Scare in 1953, and that he fully intended it as an allegory of McCarthyism.
Which is one reason it fails to stick to the history of the Salem trials AND paints a seriously misleading picture of the situation in the U.S. regarding Soviet agents after WWII.
Reblogged this on abracadabrasite.
This is an excellent article and I thank you got it. Ever since I discovered tge work of Elizabeth Loftus many years ago I have been arguing for the de-emphasising of memory as a source of data.
Our memories and our eyes deceive us; fingerprints aren’t infallible, and even DNA evidence can be questioned. Just what can be believe?
I have been through the SERE course.. It is, in my opinion, a horrible place to do a psychological study, the results of which, would somehow to be used to “indict” the memory of “Mr. Common By-Stander” who IS NEVER under the kind of stress that a SERE student goes through during the POW phase of the course.
** 800 plus “volunteers” huh? Me thinks not. The size of a normal SERE class is 20 – and at that rate, it would take quite a long time to get that many “volunteers”. I think my class was around 20 days – but I’ve heard the Navy has shortened this. The Navy currently graduates around 1,200 Sailors and Marines per year – I looked that up. So I’m thinking it’s likely these students were “highly encouraged” by the people they knew would be “torturing” them to join the study – If they were even given the option to participate at all. Technically … everyone there is a “volunteer” for the course and anything associated with it. But the level of dedication you put into each element varies … your goal is to SURVIVE and mine was not to embarrass myself too much.
** Misrembering aggressive interrogators? Yeah … that tends to happen when you aren’t allowed to look the interrogator in the face while you’re being interrogated. I did a few times and got punched in the gut for it.
** In my experience – most military guys (talking about men here) openly mock psychology as an “imaginary science” – me included. I got psyche eval’d at Sub school and they did it again I believe at the start of SERE. Well – those are things you have to get through in order to proceed with the training. I remember being asked a lot of questions – usually on a questionnaire and I would read the question and say to myself … “what answer do they want here?” … and I would write that answer regardless if it reflected my personal experience or not. Example … “have you ever thought about killing yourself?” – ANSWER “NO” because that’s what they want to hear. Of course I have thought – maybe briefly a few times of killing myself – who hasn’t? So I LIED.
And that’s what I did on tests that MATTERED.
On the ones like this study (which wouldn’t matter to a military participant since it didn’t reflect on their overall grade for the course) … which were probably anonymous … I would have written the most perverted shit on my questionnaire that I could think of … just to FUCK with the imaginary scientists who were “evaluating” me.
** People who volunteer for the kind of stuff that requires SERE training – ARE NOT NORMAL PEOPLE. I’ll be the first one to admit that. Maybe the women are – but when I went through there were no women. Guys though? We were all a bit off “kilter”. And while that was a problem for most of us growing up – joining the military and finding people even sicker than I was – was very empowering. It’s like having a license to be strange … because everyone expects you to be strange. Comparing me and my “compadres” with the general public out there is a bit of risky endeavor if you’re looking for the ground truth of something.
** And in any case … look at the study … it admits the participants were under extreme duress, to the point they were gonadally hormone suppressed. It’s stupid to think you could use results you get from a study with individuals like this – and apply to them to someone looking at a police-lineup … or witnessing a traffic accident. Try shitting into a coffee can for a week, or getting pelted with a fire hose, or waterboarded, or punched around and generally physically violated up to the legal point the instructors were allowed to – which is what I had to do at SERE and then try to compare that kind of stress to Mr. John Q. Public.
That makes no sense.
** Let’s say that all these participants were volunteers and really put forth due diligence in this study. In that case – the ONLY applicability I see for it is in understanding the quality of information a POW can bring back from captivity. Yeah – they told me to get as much detail as I could during captivity and remember as much as I could. I totally sucked at my “de-brief” and the reason is … during SERE all other priorities except survival and NOT breaking are stripped away from you. I did not break – but the ONLY reason I didn’t was because I knew my interrogators were fellow Sailors and I didn’t want to embarrass myself in front of them. I also had the knowledge that they could only fuck with me so long each day … and that it had to end at some point because they had all these other guys in the class they had to beat the shit out of too.
By the way – when I say I didn’t “break” … that simply means that in the overall – I DID NOT “break” to the point of cooperating with – or giving the interrogators vital information. I certainly “broke” to the point where I complied with stupid ass shit they told me to do … and even gave them bits of common information I figured they already knew.
Had I been in the hands of UNCONSTRAINED interrogators – I would have probably sold out the entire nation at some point if the torture was hard-core enough. Which is another reason I mock “psychologists” who say that torture doesn’t work. Let me torture YOU buddy … you will see the shit works.
Oh – and I forgot to mention that most of my interrogation “lab” was spent in an extremely sleep deprived state. Something else most witnesses don’t experience. Sleep deprivation seriously impacts every aspect of your thinking and remembering.
No kidding; being sleep deprived gave me the sensation of falling or flying and made me “see” people that had long since gone home. It is not just memories that can be false, since perception of real time events is questionable as well.
That’s why I’m saying it’s inappropriate for people to use this study to indict eyewitness testimony. Use other things – not this.
Using this is like me putting a rose plant under a water spigot and watering it until it dies – then concluding that, based on that experiment – WATER kills plants.
“Sleep deprivation” You have no idea, krulac. I once went to work at 9am on Saturday (it was one of several parallel jobs), but on Monday evening I was a total zombie. No hours between spent sleeping. That used to be health care in the UK.
I’m sure torture “works” if you mean it makes people say what the torturer wants to hear. I’m not at all sure it works if you want to rely on the truth of what he hears. Hell, torture me and I’m sure I’d confess to committing every crime known to man. That doesn’t mean I really did, but a prosecutor who starts out assuming I did isn’t going to question it.
Come on Galt … you’re smarter than that.
Of course a detainee will tell you want to hear when he’s under torture. Every interrogator knows this – that’s why they VERIFY the information they’re getting from the guy – and then confront him once they’ve verified he gave them false information.
What you’re saying, and you’re simply saying what every “wishcasting torture nay-sayer” out there is saying … is that the goal of torture is to get a person to say what you want to hear.
That reveals an incredible ignorance about the goal of torture.
The goal of torture is to get actionable information from the guy being interrogated. It’s to find out what you don’t know. Any interrogator worth his salt KNOWS that the information he gets – may not be “want people want to hear”.
Believe it or not … a trained interrogator begins his process by pushing his detainee into telling … “the first lie” … which the interrogator is trained to spot … and he’ll usually do that using “softcore” tactics. Once the detainee realizes he got busted telling a lie … the whole game changes. Suddenly, it’s not about what I’m telling an interrogator – it’s about whether or not he can figure out if it’s a lie or not. My stories then become more complicated … and by extension – easier for the interrogator to unravel.
You really need to experience this first hand to know what I’m talking about. Unfortunately, most people … save for John McCain (who experienced mostly the kind of torture used to produce propaganda confessions) – have never experienced anything approaching “torture.”
You think torture doesn’t work?
Ask yourself this question. If you have intelligence in your head that could cause grave damage to national security if you reveal it. You don’t care how bad the process of interrogation is … as long as you can keep from revealing that information. Actually, you wish you could commit suicide right now rather than take the risk of revealing that information (but that’s not an option your interrogator will give you).
So … which type of interrogator would you rather face in order to protect that information? A “softcore” guy that attempts to extract that info from you using “mind games” and “tricks” … OR A HARDCORE GUY who immediately “rewards” your lies with physical consequences?
Everybody … everybody … everybody chooses the “softcore” guy … because, on a visceral level – we instinctively know the hardcore guy will get the information from us!
It’s said, and I don’t know if it’s true, that during WW2 British agents sent to work in France were fed “information” about their work that wasn’t correct. The idea was that if they were captured they would be tortured, and that all people sooner or later “break”. So, by relying false information that they believed to be true, the agents wouldn’t endanger others unnecessarily.
But by extension that is an admission that torture is effective in revealing what the individual considers “truth”.
No one’s ever said that torture … or EIT’s (whichever term you prefer) is a silver-bullet. Obviously you cannot extract information from a guy’s head that he doesn’t have. However … when you know a guy’s position on the “food chain” … you can assess that. For instance … KSM, the mastermind behind 9-11, was at the top of the AQ food chain, so pretty good guess that his superiors in AQ never fed him “disinformation”.
People are totally free to make their own judgments about whether torture is ethical or not. I’m not arguing that – feel free to say it’s unethical. But please don’t let that “bias” influence how you view a basic FACT – that TORTURE WORKS.
Actually, there are countless examples that show torture does not work in most cases where it actually would be superior to other methods. Just look at what the French did in Algeria and what it got them. And they went to the extremes possible. Sure, if your opponent is utterly naive and the torture victim is stupid, you may gets some info you could also have gotten in some other fashion. But usually, you will just end up like Darth Vader after he had Princess Leia tortured: With false information.
As the same time, torture has an extreme David vs. Goliath effect, i.e. it gets your opponents sympathy and makes them stronger.
All in all, what is left is that torture boils down not to be something done to get information, but to destroy an enemy. That is counterproductive and irrational.
David vs. Goliath – name one conflict in the last 80 years the US has been in where our POWs were not tortured by the enemy? So that is a bullshit argument on it’s face. Did the North Vietnamese torturing our soldiers gain any sympathy for us? No. So you’re wrong there.
Darth Vader and false information. Proven wrong – since the EIT’s used on KSM produced LOTS of information – including information that led to the killing of UBL.
A detainee can only give you false information one or two times. Let’s remember here – YOU HAVE HIM IN CAPTIVITY. You do not let him go. If he gives you false info you verify it and, when proven false, you issue the consequences of lying to him. It works – it is absolutely IMBECILIC to believe it doesn’t. You’re an IT guy right? You want to say right now that you can keep all your passwords in your head and not reveal them to an interrogator who is UNCONSTRAINED and uses physical torture?
You are extremely naïve.
.
The reason that people like you believe that torture doesn’t work – is because it’s the only way you can solve this ethical problem …
** There is a nuclear bomb somewhere in the US and it will kill millions of innocent civilians. You have the guy who hid the bomb in custody – how far are you willing to go to get the information to save millions of YOUR “tribe”?
And so … because you want to be “progressively-minded” you fabricate in your head that torture doesn’t work and it would be useless to try it – and that’s the way you EXCUSE YOUR CONSCIENCE when the bomb goes off.
That is the reason you delude yourself. I went through, what I would call, a minor “bout” with torture … and I know it will break you. It will break everyone. They even taught me that in SERE school … “You will break, maybe not here – but when you’re in the captivity of unconstrained interrogators – you WILL break.” The SERE course is NOT about teaching guys not to “break” it’s about teaching them to hold out as long as possible – to be faithful to their values … to not become a “collaborator” … and to, once broken, bounce back as quickly as possible.
The guys who teach that course – ARE EXPERTS. They KNOW. You’re liberal friends who say otherwise – KNOW NOTHING.
Also, “progressives” like to say … “there are countless examples where torture doesn’t work.”
Yes … and there are countless examples where PLANES don’t work and they crash. Yet … they are still one of the primary modes of travel aren’t they?
And why is that? Because, statistically speaking, your chances of getting on a plane that will crash are very small.- so for the vast majority of people – flying is safe and efficient.
It’s also funny … that when “progressives” say the term “countless examples” – they only cite two or three actual examples.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/05/11/stephen-carter-torture-can-be-wrong-and-still-work.html
It is not about facts, it is about impression. The more powerful party is already at a disadvantage there and using “crushing” tactics makes this worse. You wonder why so many people dislike the US? Look no further than this effect.
As to torture: Keep telling yourself that it works, because otherwise you would have to acknowledge a barbaric need for revenge.
Your bomb-scenario is contrived. Nobody smart enough to build a nuke would open themselves up to an attack like this. Yes, I do understand information-security and risk management and that is exactly what is needed here. In the bomb-scenario, the person coordinating this would have made sure that the information where it is stays isolated from the information what it is. If your torture victim does not know, then no amount of skill on the side of the interrogator is going to help.
Personally, I think “recovering” memories of rape or abuse in somebody is just the same as raping or abusing them. People that do this to others should be treated the same and should go away for the same time as if they had committed the actual act.
[…] Maggie McNeill discusses some of the problems we encounter when we depend on “eye witness accounts” of events: […]
Faulty memories of a trauma (False Witness)? It definitely happens.
When I was around 10, a female cousin of mine of the same age was visiting my family (I’m male). We were out bike riding one evening (had done so for a few days in a row) when another kid, male, about 14, approached us, lured us behind a house, and attempted to molest/rape her. I fled, as I recalled that there were 4 adults about 50 yards away on the other side of the street in front of the house, so I went to them to try to get help (they looked at me like I was speaking Klingon – in 1972 or so). She managed to get away from him on her own, and returned to my parents home on her bike. My parents called the police, who instructed them to separate the two of us. The police showed up in under 30 minutes. They spoke to my cousin first. The only thing she got correct about the attacker was his race. She got his clothes wrong, and forgot he wore glasses (and she was obviously extremely shook up as a result of the attack), and she was face to face with him, during the day, in well lit conditions, for over a minute. As a result, I was who the police had ID the attacker. We were “fortunate” in that the same boy had raped a 4 year old neighbor a few days earlier, and she had identified him by name as she knew him. The same detective was investigating both attacks, and so he had a good idea who it was based on my description and the neighborhood where it occurred.
There have been studies that show that the false rape accusation rate is as high a 40%. This isn’t because 40% of rape claims are false, it’s because a woman may accuse the wrong man because of the trauma of the attack having an effect on her memory. She’ll wind up accusing someone who resembles the man she remembers, without realizing that her memory of the attacker is faulty.