"Do you recognize any of these people?"

We have often heard the phrase “seeing is believing”, and for the longest time, it was considered to be true. The same is true in the criminal justice department, where eyewitness testimony has been seen to be an extremely reliable source of evidence. After all, it is difficult to fool the eyes, is it not? Well, research shows otherwise.

Eyewitness testimony is a legal term defined as an account of events given by people who have witnessed the event (Mcleod, 2018). The term brings forth images of courtrooms, where witnesses point to the perpetrator, or of witnesses standing in a police station, scanning a line-up of suspects. While these have been seen to be one of the most reliable sources of evidence, current research however suggests something else.

While it is true that it is difficult to fool the eyes, research has shown that it is quite easy to fool the brain, and just with a small change in the questions asked. The research conducted by Elizabeth Loftus has been quite eye-opening in regard to the validity of eyewitness testimony. In one study, it was shown that participants’ mental reconstruction of an event, a car crash, changed drastically with the switch of a single word; “hit” versus “smashed.” This small word change showed that participants remembered the incident as being more drastic when asked the question with the loaded word “smashed” (Loftus & Palmer, 1974). And this is only the tip of the iceberg! In the recent decades, memory reconstruction has become a popular field of study in cognitive psychology.

Do the studies pointing to the fact that memory is easily influenced throw out the reliability of eyewitness testimony? Not at all, since in many cases, eyewitness testimony can be one of the only types of evidence available since DNA evidence is not always available for a conviction. The same research conducted by Loftus and her peers also gives suggestions to help with the most accurate eyewitness accounts, such as removing the human element and using neutral language.

One should not be ready to throw eyewitness testimony out of the window, but rather rely on the vast hearth of research being conducted to help make it as reliable as possible. The human brain can be fooled, but with the right nudge, can be quite accurate.

REFERENCES:

1. Loftus, E. F., & Palmer, J. C. (1974). Reconstruction of auto-mobile destruction: An Example of the Interaction Between Language and Memory. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behaviour, 13, 585-589

2. McLeod, S. (2018). Eyewitness Testimony. Simply Psychology. https://www.simplypsychology.org/eyewitness-testimony.html