Personal Human Error

The human mind can be a very important tool, but it can also be highly flawed. The mind can remember an extensive amount of information. However, it can make people think things happened that never truly happened. Eyewitness testimony has always played an important role as evidence in the courts system. Juries on a trial tend to believe eyewitness testimony over any other evidence, even if other evidence differs from the eyewitness testimony. When little other evidence is presented, eyewitness testimony tends to be the primary focus. Many wrongful convictions have occurred due to these false eyewitness statements. According to George Vallas, in “A survey of Federal and State Standards for the Admission of Expert Testimony on the

The human mind is not like a tape recorder obviously, it does not record events exactly as seen in the moment of a crime, and neither can the events be recalled precisely like a tape that can rewind back in time. Therefore, making eyewitness identification inaccurate. For example, in the case of a

Is our justice system fair? Is our justice system truly set out to do what it was meant to do? Or are there social factors and memory errors that come into play that can change a conviction outcome. In today’s court rooms we have, Defense attorneys, Prosecutors, judges, juries, evidence, forensics experts, witness testimonies, and of course the human memory. What better type of evidence than the human memory, right? Unfortunately, human memory is subject to the power of suggestion and unable to truly recall an event when told to recall. In other words, the story may not be the same as the one that actually happened the day of that event because many variables come into play like cross examinations and the way a question can be asked can alter the answer or how the event was perceived. The main focus of this paper is to see how the human brain is not able to effectively recall events which could possibly convict an innocent person of wrong doing. Also how lawyers use the misinformation effect to their advantage. In order to understand how something as simple as a question can decide a person’s faith we must first answer some questions. First, How does memory actually work and how is memory retrieved when your need to answer a question or being cross examined? Second, how does the misinformation effect play a role when a witness needs to testify against the defense or vice versa? Third, how can structuring a word or sentence effect the outcome of a conviction?

Eyewitness Identification may be more reliable than we believe, if they are handled and assessed correctly. Eyewitness testimonies are often used by law enforcement officers to identify suspects and play a huge role in getting convictions. If witnesses identify the wrong person, an innocent man could be punished for something they had no involvement in. There are many theories to explain why witnesses may identify the wrong person as the perpetrator of a crime. The different ways we retrieve memories affects what we remember. Other theories have to deal with how lineups or photo arrays are displayed to the witness and the effect they have on the result. All of the different theories of how our memories can be influenced, cause people to argue

Although at times it can be unreliable, the function of it makes us who we are. Currently in Psychology 1100, we are learning about memory, which ties into the article completely. Short-term memory and long-term memory, two important parts of a humans recollection. Short-term memory lasts less than 30 seconds then disappears, the mind chooses what to remember, it takes what is important and processes it to long-term memory. On a daily basis many don’t memorize what their friend was wearing, but we have in long-term memory what their physical features are, height, weight, age, build, etc., this allows us to easily recognize who they are and therefore we remember it. With strangers it’s entirely unnecessary to remember what clothes they’re wearing or what they look like because there is nothing connecting you to them, now if something occurs where you ran into them or had an awkward conversation, your mind would remember it because it was personal and that memory will continue to replay within one’s mind. Now a crime occurs where you were waiting in line at a store and someone robbed the place, you would barely remember what they looked like because you were maybe more focused on your safety and only had a glance, yet some people even without knowing who robbed the store would give a testimony that is presumably false. One aspect I don’t understand is how some investigations and cases solely rely on witness testimony and so many people have been falsely accused because they were “seen” at the crime by a bystander who had very little recollection of the story and pieced in the rest of the information through a schema that they had. With some many of these occurrences it would be a surprise to me if any investigation continued to rely on a witness testimony unless that witness is someone who was trained on remembering these events. I assume articles similar to these give more insight and a compelling argument to

What is causing physicians and hospitals to re-examine ways of working more closely together? What types of collaborative partnerships are being developed in the industry? Discuss legal issues that arise in a joint venture between a hospital and physicians that the group practice administrator must be prepared to address.

Eyewitness memory is not reliable because the memory of the witness may change throughout the case. The witness may

Suggestions lead to misinformation, which leads to wrongful convictions. Paz-Alonso and Goodman (2008) stated that in the Moscow terrorist bombings, researchers talked to witnesses after the attack and indicated that others saw wounded animals in the attack. About 13% of the participants accepted the information as true. The acceptance of false information can be effected by the time difference of the event and the misinformation (Paz-Alonso and Goodman, 2008, p. 59-62). There is not a basic science to how we recall things or how memories can be manipulated by suggestions. Knowing that suggestions could change the way a witness remembers something, could mean that police officers need to change the way they ask a person what they saw and not to make suggestions. The more time that passes from an event, the harder it can be to remember a situation or get information correctly. Paz-Alonso and Goodman (2008) conducted a study of how time and retention intervals can lead to wrong responses. The participants in the study showed that just after two weeks the retention of memories had a much higher rate of misled information. Time can cause a memory to fade or even cause some details change (p. 59). In California, the time between the day a crime was committed to the trial date can be vary. Over that period of time a witness could start to have trouble remembering the

The second estimator variable is the human mind can only remember so much. Human memory can be contaminated, lost or destroyed like physical evidence. (Goldstein, A. M. & Weiner, I. B. 2003) Human memory is rarely accurate on things that place especially when dealing with stressful events. When dealing with stressful events the victim usually picks out the filler in the line up or out of a photo array than the actual suspect. Human memory is a key factor in why eyewitness identification is very faulty.

After reading brief, To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System, I did a little research and happened to find an article from April 2015 that talked about To Err is Human. This article discussed several topics but one that stood out was that a few analysis claim that To Err is Human counted too few errors. Yes, too few. The studies performed for To Err is Human were based on what was written on medical errors. Some doctors often leave off mistakes in medical records, which would have lead to a lesser amount of errors reported. Towards the end of the article it discusses how hard it is to know on a broad scale whether things are getting better, which goes along with the issue as to whether or not conditions have improved as a result of,

Two different but similar forms of writing are able to be tied down into one general but specific category. In the book, Mistakes Were Made (but not by me), by Elliot Aronson and Carol Tavris, Aronson and Tavris commentates on events that people go through. The book is mainly about Elliot Aronson’s and Carol Tavris’ opinion on how people behave and should behave when caught in tough situations. Instead of focusing on one main character in the book, each section of the book illustrates a different person 's’ situation and that situation would correspond with a specific theme in the chapter. Throughout the book, Aronson and Tavris give us a broad idea of how some psychological thinking/processes comes into play, each psychological concept corresponds to a chapter or section in the book, these ideas are: confirmation bias, revision of memories, self-justification, pyramid of choice, cognitive dissonance, blind spots, closed loops, reducing cognitive dissonance, blaming, self-justification (for the greater good), and (sunk costs). Another form of writing, “Wrong Answer”, by Rachel Aviv, is an article focusing on the main idea of a school going through tough times and the outcome of the actions taken by the staff. The article revolves around Parks Middle School in Atlanta. The teachers and staff in Parks Middle School were caught cheating and changing the answers students submitted for standardized tests, and this little mess resulted in hundreds of teachers being laid off and

(Wright ET. Al, 2009, p.2) backs up this claim and he also suggests that “one person’s error can become part of another person’s account, and this error can lead to miscarriages of justice.” the original account of what happened could be altered making the recollection of the event not actually accurate. There are factors in which people combine their own memory with another’s memory includes confidence of the person, expertise of an individual and the social costs of disagreeing with each other. An incident in 2008 involving the murder of a TV presenter Jill Dando backs up the suggestion that discussion by witness can lead to unreliability.

Experiment 1 results found that many of the students failed to remember the initial data provided to them at the onset of the study, which provided the effect of misinformation on the memory of the participant: “These analyses revealed a significant main effect for misinformation items, F(1, 163) = 9.89, p = .002, ηp2 = .06, 90 % CI for effect size = [.01, .12] (Cochran et al, 2016, p.721). This data confirms that the students had not retained the original memory of the crimes committed, which resulted in a large-scale choice blindness. In this manner, the multiple –choice segment of this study exposed memory lapses as part of the re-evaluation process of the participant 's memories. Therefore, misinformation was not properly identified in the remembrance of these criminal scenarios.

According to Science Daily, “Eyewitnesses could be led to believe they saw something they didn’t when the interviewer performed misleading hand gestures.” Studies are being conducted showing how lawyers, police, or investigators actions can lead to eyewitnesses stating something that happened that they now remember. In addition, Sydney Studies show that witnesses who discussed an event with a co-witness are very likely to incorporate misinformation into their memory for the event. The people they associate with can also affect the outcome of their statement, which in the end is not always good. Also repeating their statement to multiple people can lead to details being missed or key events changed because of forgetting certain things. As time goes on, people forget more and more information. Given these points, the people that associate with the eyewitness and their surroundings that come in between the crime scene and testimony have an influence making eyewitnesses less important and reliable than most people

Memory facilitates necessary functions in daily life activities, but it is not a perfect mechanism in operation. Goldstein (2011) states that memory is, “…the process involved in retaining, retrieving, and using information about stimuli, images, events, ideas, and skills after the original information is no longer present” (p.116). There are many adaptive functions within the complexities of the human memory system and the interlinked constructs between each function leave room for doubt in the accuracy of recollection. Study of the human mind has opened avenues of discovery on the inner workings of our brains and the resulting knowledge suggests that humans are prone to creating false memories and even remembering things that never actually happened. A great deal of information has been written explaining the nature of memory errors and within the following pages a real-life case offers a glimpse into how recall distortions and memory errors can wield unpleasant consequences. Memory errors can be avoided with a significant effort, but the truth remains that no one is perfect and memories are subject to individual bias.