Eyewitness: How Accurate Is Visual Memory?

Although the earliest Gospel of Mark was conservatively written over 40 years after the life and death of Jesus and, although these stories circulated in various oral traditions for decades by people who were to illiterate to give these narratives some form of textual stability; major Christian apologists assure us that, other than some minor textual problems that probably were added by careless scribes copying the text, the originals are very trustworthy accounts of what the Historical Jesus really said and did. But is this really the case at all?

Below are two links from CBS’s 60 Minutes that reveal the problems and deception of eyewitness accounts and how they can not be trusted.

Exclusive: The Bunny Effect

Manufacturing Memories

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good to see the issue of eyewitness testimony coming to the forefront, and how apropos. Just two days ago I was telling some JW visitors about the fallibility of eyewitness testimony (not to mention that the only authentication of the testimony is an anonymous book written in the bronze age).

As it so happens, I was jailed for armed robbery based on the faulty identification by three eye witnesses and my wife's psych thesis was based on the events of my case (which, thankfully, was dismissed after they caught the real perp). It was then that I learned why and how memory can be manipulated and not to trust my own.

Anonymous said...

Hi Harry,
I have an article in draft on Eye witness testimony and here are some web resources I plan to use.

Memories
Search ScienceDaily.com for Memories

ScienceDaily.com, Memory


Witness
sciencedaily.com, Witness

Google Search of ScienceDaily.com for Eye Witness

How to use google to "datamine" www.sciencedaily.com or any other website for a term
type the word site: into googles search field followed by the url of the site and the search term as follows

site:www.sciencedaily.com "eye witness"

to search other sites besides sciencedaily, just replace the url with another one and replace the quoted phrase with another one.

I find datamining with google to be very useful.

Anonymous said...

and here a a couple I forgot,
rather than do the link,
just go to amazon.com and type in the following two phrases in the search field

the first book in the following search phrase is by my Hero Douglas Walton
Witness Testimony Evidence: Argumentation and the Law

and this one just brings up a list of books about eyewitness testimony.
eyewitness testimony

Acheron said...

Yes, even taking into account strong oral traditions, eyewitness accounts are definitely not something to be trusted.

Read some of Elizabeth Loftus's work on eyewitness testimony. She's paid quite well as an expert witness in her field during case trials.

AIGBusted said...

Excellent Post. I'd like to see more of this type of thing on this blog.

strangebrew said...

There is a small group of scholars that suggest that Mark was written a tad later then the 40 or so year time line mentioned.
Referring to events mentioned in the document it seems a better fit has been postulated to the second Century AD.
Mark was not an eye-witness nor was he seemingly a follower just an interpreter to Peter.
It was also based on Luke John and Mathew documentation...
And no doubt several authors added...constructed and reinforced the message depending on the perceived need at certain times.

Whatever...what is clear is there were no actual eye-witnesses to the supposed execution that either can be traced definitively or those that claimed to be there to give a coherent account.

Adding to blind accounts of a rumor and a story that now approached urban myth status with unsubstantiated eye witness accounts many years after a supposed event...with different authors and different translations and mostly erroneous assumptions over several hundred years and what exactly have you got...

The Bible.

Harry H. McCall said...

Lee,
Thanks again Lee for the "heads up" on locating these sites on google. I have never used the datamine.

Harry

Anonymous said...

I saw a presentation from an eyewitness expert in college. The presenter was used in numerous trials to discredit the authority of eyewitness testimony.

At the end of the presentation he showed a video of a man run into a room, leave a bomb, and climb out the window before it exploded. You could easily identify the man's face in the video. The presenter then immediately showed us a line up of men to pick out the guilty person.

I was convinced without any doubt that I had picked the correct man in the lineup. I was wrong. If I can be wrong about an eyewitness testimony moments after witnessing it, how can we trust stories written 40+ years after the fact?

Jason Long said...

We studied this issue in depth in my undergrad cognitive psychology class. I actually wrote about one issue in my latest book:

I have never honestly understood the apologetic position that the skeptic must accept the story of a dead man coming back to life based on the (alleged) say-so of a few witnesses and historians. If I can gather one hundred people to write reports that claim I was killed and came back to life a week later, would the “standard rules for testing the truth claims” of these documents force people to accept that the story is true? Hardly. Common sense tells us that there are many explanations more likely than the one reported. Which suggestion should we find more likely: the rules of the universe fell apart two thousand years ago, or superstitious people were mistaken two thousand years ago? It is intellectually unacceptable to believe in the absurd resurrection claim based upon the works of anonymous authors who recorded (perhaps second-hand) the testimonies of individuals whom we know little about (particularly in the case of Mark and Luke).
A possible explanation as to why there was apparently a growing belief in the early second century for a physical resurrection has been found in psychological study of eyewitness behavior. According to Sagan, the results of one such study imply that witnesses of events become convinced of suggested incidents that did not happen. Subjects in a controlled experiment were made to watch a film of a traffic accident, and the researchers mentioned the presence of a stop sign that was not in the film. When the researchers revealed the deception, some subjects vehemently protested the assertion and stressed how vividly they remembered a stop sign being in the film. Moreover, as more time passed between the viewing and revealing, people were increasingly convinced of their original belief in a stop sign.
Perhaps as the rumor of a resurrection grew at the turn of the century, members of an older generation could have “remembered” details of the event. One could have “remembered” a guard at the tomb; one could have “remembered” someone who saw Jesus after the resurrection; one could have “remembered” seeing him go into the sky. We do not fully know why the belief in a resurrection exploded in the second century, but we can certainly eliminate implausible suggestions.

strangebrew said...

'When the researchers revealed the deception, some subjects vehemently protested the assertion and stressed how vividly they remembered a stop sign being in the film. Moreover, as more time passed between the viewing and revealing, people were increasingly convinced of their original belief in a stop sign.'

What you are describing here is 'repressed memory syndrome'

Or more aptly...'False memory'

In the 80's in Blighty families and communities were literally torn apart because a couple of senior Social service officials...members of an Evangelical church apparently...decided that devil worship... sacrificial children... sexual abuse...you name it...was occurring in remote villages and in one famous case on a housing estate.

The houses were raided by police and social services and families were split up to protect society.

This report details the case...it is harrowing ant disturbing reading...

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~dlheb/jetrepor.htm

This is a case that was sparked by the first case because lessons were not learned.

http://men.typepad.com/mens_hour/2004/07/satanic_abuse_m.html

All these allegations were originally a result of these two social security heroes reading this book...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelle_Remembers

And a series of in house Social security training videos obtained from their opposite numbers from an American Social security agency situated in the bible belt of America...detailing Satanic worship and what signs to look for!
They also relied on back up from two medical doctors that had also viewed this material...and surprise surprise were also apparently...Evangelical Christians...

In the final reports...all original charges have been dropped and subsequent referral to Repressed memory and the fact the instigators of the probe were evangelical Christians has also been ...well...repressed!

It seems that a certain mind set is willing to believe nonsense without hard evidence...so convinced were they...and so confident of RMS that families were destroyed and kids traumatized.

All the movers and shakers in this debacle were revealed to be ...in early press releases...Evangelicals...it was not clear if they attended the same cult...and subsequent mentions of their xian affiliations were mysteriously dropped from media reports...those officials never...as far as I know... either lost their job or were disciplined in any way...although the social security drones were apparently given re-training.