Witness testimonies have been shown to be pretty unreliable. Many innocent people have been convicted based off eye-witness testimony, which was overturned by DNA evidence. One interesting example is from Buckhout in 1980, provocatively titled "2000 witnesses can be wrong"
Buckhout performed an experiment with 2,145 at-home viewers of a popular news broadcast. The television network played a 13-second clip of a mock robbery, produced by Buckhout. In the video, viewers watched a man in a hat run up behind a woman, knock her over, and take her purse. The perpetrator's face was only visible for about 3.5 seconds. The clip was followed by the announcer asking participants at home for cooperation in identifying the man who stole the purse. There was a lineup of six male suspects, each having a number associated with him. The people at home could call a number on their screen to report which suspect they believed was the perpetrator. The perpetrator was suspect number 2. Callers also had the option of reporting that they did not believe the perpetrator was in the lineup. Approximately equal contingents of participants chose suspects 1, 2, or 5, while the largest group of participants, about 25 percent, said they believed the perpetrator was not in the lineup. Even police precincts called in and reported the wrong man as the one they believed committed the crime. A key purpose of this experiment was aimed toward proving the need for better systems of getting suspect descriptions from eyewitnesses.
I believe that the details of the memory that are filled in are simply logical guesses based off priors. I don't think this is controversial.
I also believe that you can learn to tell the difference internally.
I came about this belief by dream journaling.
Dreams Don't Make Sense
Dreams don't make sense, so it's funny when I was trying to write them down that I'd try to make it make sense. I'd say:
"My brother and I were trying to ride the rollercoaster, and then my brother disappeared and I was in the ride with a stuffed octopus"
When actually:
"My brother and I were in line for the coaster" -> " I turned a corner" -> "I'm in the cart with the stuffed octopus"
My brother did disappear, yes, but I never actually noticed that he did in the dream. It just makes logical sense that I would've noticed that he disappeared before being in the ride.
Dreams are especially nice because they don't need to make sense, so it can be more obvious when you're doing the "filling in the gaps w/ logical guesses" mental motion.
Noticing Confusion
A similar sensation happens when I notice confusion. It's the feeling of forcing something to fit that doesn't (or noticing the dissonance).
How to Improve
Besides dream journalling, you can do:
Track-Back Meditation
Go back the past few minutes on what you did. Some of what you did will have missing spots which you could fill with a logical guess. When doing so, notice this difference.
Draw a Picture after a Glance
Looking at a picture for a couple seconds, then trying to draw the details. Some of it will be remembered & some will be logical guesses. Notice this diff!
I've included 2 examples below. Ideally you'll use a pen & paper, where your "for sure a true memory" parts are [blue/pen/etc] and your "probably a logical guesses" are in [red/pencil/dashed].
If that's too much trouble, I also included some questions you can answer w/o drawing anything.
1. Look for a second only. Give it a draw. Questions are below
A. How many branches? & Where?
B. Shape of cliff?
C. Where did the moon intersect the cliff? The branches?
D. What was the background?
E. Anything feel like a logical guess vs a visual memory? Feel free to check
2. For this one, adjust how long you look depending on how difficult the above was
A. Location of beavers?
B. Did the beavers have buck teeth showing?
C. Where were the fish?
D. What was each beaver holding?
E. Again, the important part is noticing the difference between a memory and a logical guess, so did you notice any of those?
And of course, you can do this with other pictures (or simply looking around you).
Where's the Ground Truth Feedback so You're Not Just Fooling Yourself?
Besides the drawing one, both dream journalling & track-back meditation don't have ground truth verificaiton. This criticism is the one I'm most expecting, so I will make my claim more precise:
You can tell the difference between the mental motion of
(1) "logical guesses based on priors" and
(2) "accurate memory recall"
I interpret (1) as "definitely a logical guess so don't claim that actually happend" and (2) as "most likely an accurate memory, but not guaranteed".
Or alternatively:
Splitting these up has been very useful to me for applying the appropriate evidential weight to each of these.
If you believe you internally can't tell the difference, even with practice, then I think this is false humbleness, similar to how knowing about biases can hurt people (specifically knowing about false eye-witnesses can make you not trust your own memories as much as you should). This is an empirical claim you can falsify though!
I do believe an additional source of information that this distinction is real is that it's internally the same [mental feeling?] as noticing confusion.
How to Trust Other People
Noticing this in myself; however, has made me more suspicious of other people's testimony. I have asked "Is that a real memory, or a logical implication?" before, but I think this really requires practice in low-stake situations (eg dream journaling) before trust can be established.
A specific example is asking "Did they phrase it in those exact words?", because it's easier to remember your interpretation of someone else's words than their exact ones.[1]
Would greatly appreciate how you tactfully ask these sorts of questions to others, if y'all have advice!
- ^
Recalling longer amounts of speech might be the most useful exercise here actually. Feel free to add anything like that in the comments.