Unconscious Transference
Imagine that you witness a crime. The police suspect that Robby Robber was the perpetrator, and so they place Robby’s picture onto a page together with five other photos, and they show you this “photospread.” You point to Robby’s photo and say, “I think that’s the guy, but I’m not at all sure.” The police can’t count this as a positive identification, but, based on other evidence they become convinced that Robby is guilty, and so he’s arrested and brought to trial.
During the trial, you’re asked to testify, and, when you’re on the stand, the prosecutor asks, “Do you see the perpetrator in the courtroom?” You answer “yes,” and so the prosecutor asks you to indicate who the robber is. You point to Robby and say, “That’s the guy—the man at the defense table.”
In-court identifications, like the one just described, are powerful events and are enormously persuasive for juries. But, in truth, in-court ID’s are problematic for four reasons. First, research tells us that people are often better at realizing that a face is familiar than they are in recalling why the face is familiar. In the imaginary case just described, therefore, you might (correctly) realize that Robby’s face is familiar and sensibly conclude that you’ve seen his face before. But then you might make an error about where you’d seen his face before, perhaps mistakenly concluding that Robby looks familiar because you saw him during the crime, when in actuality he looks familiar only because you’d seen his picture in the photospread! This error is sometimes referred to as unconscious transference, because the face is, in your memory, unconsciously “transferred” from one setting to another. (You actually saw him in the photospread, but in your memory you “transfer” him into the original crime—memory’s version of a “cut-and-paste” operation.)
Second, notice that in our hypothetical case you had made a tentative identification from the photospread. You had, in effect, made a commitment to a particular selection, and, once done, it’s often difficult to set aside your initial choice in order to get a fresh start in a later identification procedure. Thus, your in-court ID of Robby is likely to be influenced by your initial selection from the photospread—even if you made your initial selection with little confidence.
Third, in-court identifications are inevitably suggestive. In the courtroom, it’s obvious from the seating arrangement who the defendant is. The witness also knows that the police and prosecution believe the defendant is guilty. These facts, by themselves, put some pressure on the witness to make an identification of the defendant—especially if the defendant looks in any way familiar.
Fourth, the speed of the justice system is less than any of us would wish, and so trials often take place many months (or years) after a crime. Therefore, there has been ample opportunity for a witness’s memory of the crime to fade. As a result, the witness doesn’t have much of an “internal anchor” (a good and clear memory) to guide the identification, making the witness all the more vulnerable to the effects of suggestion or the effect of the earlier commitment.
How worried should we be about these various problems—the risk of unconscious transference, the effects of commitment, the impact of a suggestive identification procedure, the effect of passing time? Research suggests that each of these can have a powerful effect on eyewitness identifications, potentially compromising in-court identifications. Indeed, some researchers would argue that even though in-court identifications are very dramatic, they are—because of the concerns discussed here—of little value as evidence.
In addition, note that some of these concerns also apply to out-of-court identifications. I testified in one trial in which the victim claimed that the defendant looked “familiar,” and she was “almost certain” that he was the man who had robbed her. It turned out, though, that the man had an excellent alibi. What, therefore, was the basis for the victim’s (apparently incorrect) identification? For years, the defendant had, for his morning run, used a jogging path that went right by the victim’s house. It seems likely, therefore, that the defendant looked familiar to the victim because she had seen him during his run—and that she had then unconsciously (and mistakenly) transferred his face into her memory of the crime.
It’s crucial, therefore, that the courts and police investigators do all that they can to avoid these various concerns. Specifically, if a witness thinks that the defendant “looks familiar,” it’s important to ask whether there might be some basis for the familiarity other than the crime itself. With steps like these, we can use what we know about memory to improve the accuracy of eyewitness identifications—and, in that way, improve the accuracy and the efficiency of the criminal justice system.
Critical Questions
1. What is "unconscious transference," and why could it lead to a misidentification in the courtroom? |
|
2. What the three reasons described in this essay explain why in-court identifications of a defendant could be problematic? |
|
3. How does the phenomenon of unconscious transference relate to the concepts of familiarity and source memory? |
|
Submit to Gradebook:
The Cognitive Interview
Police investigations often depend on eyewitness reports: Who was present at the scene of the crime? What words did they say? How were they dressed? Questions like these can provide valuable clues—but what can we do if eyewitnesses can’t recall the event, and so can’t answer these questions? Are there steps we can take to help witnesses remember?
A number of exotic procedures have been proposed to promote witness recollection, including hypnosis and memory-enhancing medications. Evidence suggests, however, that these procedures provide little benefit (and may, in some settings, actually harm memory). Indeed, “hypnotically enhanced memory” is inadmissible as trial evidence in most jurisdictions. A much more promising approach is the cognitive interview, a technique developed by psychologists with the specific aim of improving eyewitness memory. Many studies suggest that this procedure does help witnesses remember more about an event; especially important, it does so without encouraging memory errors. It is gratifying, then, that the cognitive interview has been adopted by a number of police departments as their preferred interview technique.
How does the cognitive interview work? Let’s start with the fact that sometimes you cannot remember things simply because you didn’t notice them in the first place, and so no record of the desired information was ever placed in long-term storage. In this situation, no procedure—whether it’s the cognitive interview, or hypnosis, or simply trying really really hard to recall—can locate information that isn’t there to be located. You cannot get water out of an empty bottle, and you cannot read words off a blank page. In the same fashion, you cannot recall information that was never placed in memory to begin with.
In other cases, though, the gaps in your recollection have a different source: The desired information is in memory, but you’re unable to find it. (We’ll have more to say about this point in Chapter 7, when we discuss theories of forgetting.) To overcome this problem, the cognitive interview relies on context reinstatement: The police investigator urges the witness to think back to the setting of the target event: How did the witness feel at the time of the crime? What was the physical setting? What was the weather? As Chapter 6 discusses, these steps are likely to put the witness back into the same mental state, the same frame of mind, that he or she had at the time of the crime—and, in many cases, these steps will promote recall.
In addition, the chapter’s discussion of retrieval paths leads to the idea that sometimes you’ll recall a memory only if you approach the memory from the right angle—using the proper retrieval path. But how do you choose the proper path? The cognitive interview builds on the simple notion that you don’t have to choose! Instead, you can try recalling the events from lots of different angles (via lots of different paths), in order to maximize your chances of finding a path that leads to the desired information.
Thus, for example, the cognitive interview encourages witnesses first to recount the event from its start to its end, and then recount it in reverse sequence from the end back to the beginning. Sometimes, witnesses are also encouraged to take a different spatial perspective: “You just told me what you saw; try to remember what Joe would have seen, from where he was standing.”
As you can see, then, the cognitive interview builds on principles well established in research—the role of context reinstatement, for example, or the importance of retrieval paths. It’s no surprise, therefore, that the cognitive interview is effective; the procedure capitalizes on mechanisms that we know to be helpful. More important, the cognitive interview provides a clear example of how we can use what we know about memory to aid anyone—including law enforcement professionals—who needs to draw as much information from memory as possible.
Critical Questions
1. How does the cognitive interview apply the principles of state-dependent learning and context reinstatement? |
|
2. Why is it that techniques like the cognitive interview cannot help witnesses recall information to which they did not initially pay attention? |
|
3. Try to remember your first day at college, using techniques from the cognitive interview. What specific strategies could you use to increase the level of detail of your memory? |
|
Submit to Gradebook: