News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:The All-American Delusion of the Polygraph by XorNot on Tuesday July 16, 2024 @10:09PM (#40981984)
Academia has reproduced this result a fair bit: under interrogation it's very easy to convince people to admit to events happening which didn't. Eyewitness testimony is thus intensely unreliable - and psychologically as far as can be told, the act of remembering something makes the memory itself labile - i.e. you rewrite a memory as you recall it.

So rounds of intense questioning on the same subject infect any recollection of the experience someone has - amplifying or even adding events which didn't exist due to the focus of it.

And this has very real consequences - it was one of the driving forces of the satanic panic in in the 1980s[1] - for which people went to jail on the basis of "recovered memories".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_panic

There are no comments on this comment yet.