Boffins: It's EASY to make you GRASS YOURSELF UP for crimes you never did

You remember when you and Dave and Ben and Osama blew up that building right?

The implications are quite chilling. You don't need to rely on torture to get unreliable confessions. I can only see this increasing unreliable confessions in countries where nailing someone vengefully is more important than finding the perpetrator.

I remember there was a study a few years ago where they planted false memories in children. (The false memory was of a holiday that never happened) It's quite chilling that this can be done to adults too.

"- A political party wishes to gain election. Seed false memories of immigration issues which blighted your childhood or perhaps you now 'remember' being out of work when the other lot were in power. On the other hand since we've been in power Things Have Never Been So Good., etc."

You think they are not already aware of this and haven't already been using the techniques for years? You just have to look at how governments of all colours handle contentious legislation. There's a "leak" of a report of the worst case, watch the press and public outrage, claim it's just an early draft, roll back a bit, then announce the "watered down" version (which is what they wanted in the first place) and everyone sighs with relief that now it's only half their rights being stolen instead of all of them.

Then there's Camerons "Nudge Department" which is specifically tasked with changing peoples behaviour. And misleading newspaper headlines which, at best, might have a "correction" on page 24 a month later.

Sadly, lots or people form their opinions based on the headlines they see advertised at the newsagents or maybe the first paragraph of the story, both of which are designed to attract attention, by misleading the reader.

Serious, indeed

@BongoJoe

Imagine that on top of this, the subject is presented with electronic "evidence" of past activities. These may be false positives mined from real data or wholly fabricated untruths.

Humans have an uncanny ability to believe (and diisbelieve) almost anything. We are just beginning to get a handle on the psychology of human response to information technology. As other readers have accurately pointed out, the potential for serious mischief is enormous.

@Bobby Omlette, or maybe university students not bright enough to be aware of what they did during the latest night on the town.

It says university students, so presumably at least the majority would be at least 18.

Re: Remember...

"For instance I never killed any neighbours pet, set fire to government buildings or shot the prime minister"

So it was just me then? I could have sworn you were there. You brought the shovel, and the petrol and handed me the gun. I remember it vividly.

Re: Remember...

I remember being a student and insisting on such things as facts and proof, as exactly the means by which studying provides any useful result. I was, and am also quite sure of having my mnemonic faculties intact, and I am absolutely sure of the things I did or did not do, For instance I never killed any neighbours pet, set fire to government buildings or shot the prime minister, no matter how badly I wanted to.

Be as absolutely sure as you like. You're still wrong. It is vanishingly unlikely that any human being's "mnemonic faculties [are] intact" in any useful sense. Decades of experimentation have amply established that.

And even before those experiments, we have philosophical ones like Descartes' "Evil Genius", which quite rightly points out that it's impossible to prove that someone hasn't by some means deranged your senses or reasoning faculties.

Are the researchers trying to have us believe that none of what we think is real actually happened, thus paving the way for total denial, and the annihilation of science itself?

Spare us the sophomoric solipsistic anguish, please. The researchers are just confirming prior results about the ease with which false memories can be established, and what rhetorical maneuvers are useful in doing so. Reasonable scientists will adopt a probabilistic outlook as they always have. That can either be frequentist ("the evidence of my senses (in interpreting my instruments) is usually consistent, and the results of my reasoning usually coincides with what others report") or Bayesian ("I'll assign small probabilities to adverse causes such as derangement"), but in either case we Just Get On With It. The lesson here is to be critical, not to throw our hands up in despair. Scientific Epistemology 101.

(This September sure is September.)

Re: After the confessions

Simple rule: Deny everything, even the existence of your interrogators if you have to.

Take away point: You decide your own reality (or else risk having someone else decide it for you)

Re: Confession as evidence

And a few samll number of centuries before that, it was ducking stools, trial by fire, trial by combat and the 'Spanish Inquisitions' favourite interrogation methods, and this is only a few hundred years after the Romans (who I beleive had at least the rudiements of a fairly sensible legal system).

Up a ladder, down a snake. The defintion of 'Progress' depends on the madness of the 'man' in charge.

Re: Confession as evidence

In many other places, the confession is admissible but only as circumstantial evidence: taken with a grain of salt. Barring it being part of a guilty plea, it's usually up to the prosecution to support the testimony with more reliable evidence.

Re: A better @ Boris

thus getting him/her to cough to it during an extended police interview and leving the real villian free.....

Sadly there are many NZ'ers in that place.

Many.

Best thing you can do is to say nothing and insist on a lawyer.

Yes. This video should be mandatory viewing for all US citizens. First a criminal defense attorney explains why you should never talk to the police without counsel; then a police officer explains why he's right. It's a long video - just short of 50 minutes - but entertaining and well worth the time.

(The officer is George Bruch. I'm not sure who the lawyer is, unfortunately.)

Edit: Just saw Haku posted a link to the same video below. I'll leave my post up because I don't want to leave one of those inscrutable "deleted by the author" notices.

I'm not sitting through

48 minutes of US twaddle, however a few key things to remember about 'not talking to the Police'.

- If I have reasonable suspicion to believe you have committed a crime and you refuse to talk to me, i.e. I've not seen you do it, but I suspect you have, and have grounds for that suspicion, then I get to arrest you.

Yay!

Twisting statements

I was once interviewed about a murder that had happened two doors away from me when I had just moved into my house. I obviously didn't do it, but I was a "stranger" to the village, and my daily habits were different from most of the others. I also resembled someone who ended up being the guilty party who had been seen leaving the village in a suspicious manner shortly after the murder was judged to have taken place. The detectives showed me a photo of the murdered lady and asked me whether I had ever seen her. My reply was very clear and accurate "I don't remember ever seeing her", which they took to mean "I have never seen her". I objected to this summary, and they couldn't understand what my objection was about. I pointed out that I said I didn't remember seeing her, but may be I had seen her and even said something like "Good morning" to her on one occasion, but it was so unimportant and trivial that I had forgotten this. However, it was remembered and reported by another neighbour when she was interviewed by them. The police took my reasoning as evidence that I was a "smart alec" and had something to hide. I am quite convinced that matters would have progressed further except that they interviewed the person who confessed and who had matching blood samples, etc to those taken at the crime scene. I have been extremely dubious about taking to the police about ANYTHING since then,

@ Christoph

I wonder how effectively you could plant false memories if you could hold someone in isolation for a decade while continually interrogating and torturing them?

Can be done in a few weeks sometimes, if the stressors are high enough.

Re: False or inaccurate memories?

It is said that most of what you remember is for the years between 15 and 25. Personally there is not a lot I can remember accurately even for those years. They were mostly full of routine which blurs any details. Even unusual events are only remembered as a "headline" fragment encapsulating the experience - with no recollection of what happened before or after. At a school reunion I discovered that two classroom blocks were joined by staircase. I had completely forgotten it when trying to draw a map in my mind - yet must have traversed it every school day between 12 and 19.

My older sister tells me that I used to sit outside a relative's house - refusing to go in because they had a ferret. While I trust her to remember things in our childhood - that one escapes me completely. She also disputes some of what I consider clear memories.

A Proustian madeleine moment can bring a long-forgotten memory into sharp focus. Subsequently what is remembered is that "remembering" - and the detail is never as sharp again. Every time the memory is recollected it is stored back with subtle changes.

Our memory seems to work with tokens for the components of a scene. It expands the token into an image, sound, smell, or emotion using stock items like a Getty library - and then fills in the gaps with plausible detail.

My long career in IT trouble-shooting taught me the truth of that old adage "Don't believe anything anyone else says they have seen - and only believe half of what you think you have seen yourself".

I have noticed that I have a "ring of truth" effect that often gives me a feeling about whether a plausible offering is really the true thing. It seems to be a pattern recognition effect - the brain only lights up when there is a perfect fit. We probably all do it when trying to remember a name - lots of near misses - then we know we have it. Some (most?) people seem to be happy with any plausible match that seems to solve the problem for their preferred result.

Re: False or inaccurate memories?

Obviously no-one wants to see people guilty of serious offences against the person walk free

That may be obvious, but it's also not true, when the alternatives are considered.

Re: Background

That is certainly one important issue, but it's hardly the only case of coaxed fallacious testimony used systematically to convict innocent people.

The broader issue is insufficiently stringent rules of evidence in various court systems. In the US, at least, there's widespread abuse of "expert" testimony that is often nothing more than outright grift.