How easily eyewitness testimony can be influenced

Here is an article from Wired describing another study on how easy it is to influence eyewitness testimony. In an interesting experiment the researchers created fake video clips that showed cheating in a gambling game, and found that, after watching the clip, witnesses to the “cheating” were quite willing to accuse a cheater even when the cheating never really happened. Memories are not literal copies of past events, they are constructions that can be easily altered and manipulated.

Fake Video Can Convince Witnesses to Give False Testimony

Psychologists have long known that our memories of past events can be influenced by misleading information, but now they’ve proven that doctored video evidence can convince people to offer false eyewitness testimony. In a study of 60 college students performing a computerized gambling task, nearly half were willing to testify that they saw their partner cheat in real life after watching fabricated video evidence. Of students who were told that video evidence existed but didn’t watch the footage themselves, only 10 percent gave false testimony.

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