Forensic Psychology For Dummies (38 page)
Read Forensic Psychology For Dummies Online
Authors: David Canter
V
isibility – the more visible the event, the better the witness is likely to recall it.
bstruction – the fewer obstructions to a witness’s view, the better the event is remembered.
nown or seen before – if a witness has seen the offender before, they’re more likely to remember that person when they see that person again in a different situation.
ny reason to remember – if something is striking or novel, it’s more likely to make a strong impression on the witness.
ime lapse – the greater the length of time between an event and the witness’s attempts to recall it, the worse their memory for that event is likely to be.
rrors or discrepancies – if parts of a witness’s testimony are inaccurate, other aspects of the testimony are also likely to be inaccurate.
If someone’s pointing a knife or gun at you, the chances are that you’re looking at the weapon rather than at the face of the attacker. Stress, fear, violence or the presence of a weapon will help you remember more clearly what is happening, but some of the details may be left out because you’re noticing what’s important to your survival and not the information that can help to identify your attacker.
Understanding unconscious transference
Human memory is much more readily influenced than you, may realise and constantly striving to make things fit together and make sense. Memory can be distorted by exposure to similar situations or people between the present event and its recall. Also, because recognition is helped by being in the situation where the things being recalled happened, an out of context witness can be aware that a person seems familiar but be confused about where he knows that person from. This process is called
unconscious transference
, where the witness remembers seeing a person but wrongly assigns that person to the criminal context.
Difficulties of cross-racial identification
Witnesses are usually good at saying whether they have been attacked by someone from their own ethnic group or a different one. However, they’re less accurate in describing the specific racial group to which an individual belongs.
Cross-racial identification seems to be more difficult for a witness than same-race identification. Studies show that people from one racial background have more difficulty in identifying individual members of another race than they do members of their own race. In one experiment, researchers put together 72 photographs of black and white males and females. Each subject viewed 24 of the slides, chosen at random. After a five-minute break, the participants viewed all 72 photographs in random order, and were asked to identify the faces that they’d seen before. Both blacks and whites were significantly better at recalling faces of their own race. Many studies confirm this fact, now called an ORB – ‘Own Race Bias’.
Even after having only a short exposure to someone, that person can be fixed in your unconscious, and then seem familiar to you in an entirely different situation. A witness, having come upon a random character, may well store that image in their mind and later reproduce the image in a different setting. For instance, if the witness to a crime is shown photographs of suspects, and the random character looks familiar, the familiarity may get interpreted by the witness as being the person they saw at the time of the crime. However, in fact, the familiarity is because they happened to have observed a random character just before the crime took place. The image of the random character has become tied up with what the witness remembers of the crime. Unconscious transference can also take place when a witness identifies a suspect from a line-up just after seeing a similar-looking person (for example, in a set of photos).The apparent familiarity may be mistakenly related back to the crime or incident rather than back to the photographs. The chances of a mistaken identification increase dramatically in these situations.
How widely unconscious transference occurs is unclear, as is what degree of familiarity with the other person is necessary – and under what circumstances – for it to surface. Psychologists all agree that unconscious transference needs to be watched out for when considering witness testimony.
In an experiment to demonstrate unconscious transference, 50 students were told a story with six characters, one of whom was a criminal. The students were shown pictures of each character, who were all generally similar in appearance. Three days later, the students were asked to choose the criminal at the centre of the story from a set of photos. In the sets of photos that didn’t include the criminal’s picture, 60 per cent of the students chose a photo of a character who’s face seemed familiar but wasn’t the criminal of the story.