PSY 300 Lecture 2: Psy 300 lecture 2
9 Mar 2017
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At the early stages, eyewitnesses provide important information to the police. Sometimes this is the only solid lead. Witness lets police jump a couple steps. Take them with a grain of salt. Big problem: eyewitness testimony is trusted by the jurors (& the court) the same as any other fact or evidence. Even in perfect situations, memory is not that great. We focus on the most interesting, negative, important things. Our brains do not objectively record data. We pull everything together with what makes sense, what we thought happened. Old information has more influence than new. Stuff you"ve learned for years and years or have had enough time to encode. It"s more difficult to change your mind later about previously held beliefs. I show you the evidence against your belief, and you believe what you already believed anyways. Rules of thumb that substitute simple information with complex stuff. There are things we just do automatically.
