What people believe about memory

Abstract

Two representative samples of adult Norwegians (n=2000) were asked a set of general and specific questions regarding their beliefs and opinions about human memory. The results indicate that on many questions, such as time of the earliest memories, inhibiting effects of collaboration, and memory for dramatic versus ordinary events, the views of the general public concurred with current research findings, and people in general had realistic views about their own memory performance. On other questions, such as the reliability of olfactory as compared with visual and auditory memory, the memory of small children in comparison with that of adults, the likelihood of repression of adult traumatic memories, and on more general questions such as the possibility of training memory and the capacity limitations of long-term memory, a large proportion of the participants expressed views that are less supported by scientific evidence. Implications of these findings are briefly discussed.

Effects of Child Interview Tactics on Prospective Jurors' Decisions

“…That is, individuals who held more negative opinions about children's general eyewitness abilities rated the child victim as being less credible. This makes intuitive sense and supports the extant literature that suggests people's prior biases about children affect concurrent perceptions and decisions in abuse cases (e.g., Magnussen et al, 2006;Wessel et al, 2013). We extended Wessel et al's findings on prior opinions in a physical abuse case to the current scenario which involved CSA.…”

Memory development: implications for adults recalling childhood experiences in the courtroom

“…These views can be at odds [8][9][10][11][12] with what has been revealed by the scientific study of memory and its development. For example, many jurors and legal professionals (e.g., judges, lawyers, police) in North America 8 and Europe (e.g., Sweden 13 and Norway 14 ) are naïve when it comes to understanding how memories are formed, how they become distorted over time, and how stress and emotion affect remembering [15][16] .…”

“…However, these narratives were sparse on peripheral information and contained reconstructive errors 5 . In an effort to understand whether 'common sense' views of memory are consistent with what the scientific study of memory has revealed, a number of researchers [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17] have posed questions about how memory operates to various legal professionals (lawyers, law enforcement officers, judges) as well as members of the general public who are eligible for jury service. As it turns out, the common sense view of memory is frequently inconsistent with the findings from memory research.…”

What Psychologists Know and Believe about Memory: A Survey of Practitioners

“…A survey of professionals in Norway showed that psychologists had more realistic views of children as witnesses than had the legal professions (Melinder, Goodman, Eilertsen, & Magnussen, 2004). In the present paper, we report a survey of a large sample (n = 857) of licensed psychologists, members of the Norwegian Psychological Association, combining items from the eyewitness questionnaire (Magnussen et al, 2008(Magnussen et al, , 2010Wise & Safer, 2004) with the memory survey of the general public (Magnussen et al, 2006) and adding an item on an issue that still seems to be disputed (Davis & Loftus, 2009), namely the question of repressed and recovered memories. The items represent memory issues on which psychologists may testify in court and issues they might face in the psychological practice.…”