Consequences of False Memories in Eyewitness Testimony: A Review and Implications for Chinese Legal Practice

Abstract

False memories can result in severe legal consequences including the imprisonment of innocent people. False memory in eyewitnesses is the largest factor contributing to miscarriages of justice in the United States. To date, no study has focused on how false memories might play a role in the Chinese legal system. The purpose of this review is to summarize the latest findings on false memory and eyewitness testimony in the literature, and to shed some light on how the Chinese legal system may incorporate these experiences into practice. Overall, false memories of eyewitnesses are generated either by external misleading information or by internal cognitive processes; false memories may guide police investigations in the wrong direction or cause eyewitnesses to misidentify an innocent person as the perpetrator. We conclude that specially designed interview protocols such as the Cognitive Interview, warnings given to eyewitnesses, and blind lineup administration may prevent or lower the risk of false memory occurrence.

Urgent issues and prospects at the intersection of culture, memory, and witness interviews: Exploring the challenges for research and practice

“…Importantly, many of these high‐profile false memory cases occurred in Western countries (Garven et al, 1998). Recently, potential false memory cases have been reported in countries such as Indonesia and China (Wang et al, 2018). For example, in the Jakarta International School case, children reported highly bizarre occurrences likely due to suggestive interviewing techniques.…”

Self‐relevance enhances susceptibility to false memory

“…Of special interest here, eyewitnesses can be either victims of a crime who experience the crime from a self‐referential perspective and thus process information in relation to themselves or can be bystanders who witness the crime happening to others. The self is a complex set of active goals and associated self‐images (Conway, 2005), and presenting cues such as one's own name or own image could serve as an operation to activate the self (Cunningham et al., 2014; Wang et al., 2018, 2022). Encoding information in relation to oneself (e.g., one's own name or image) is well‐known for its effect on shaping memory (Klein, 2012; Symons & Johnson, 1997).…”

“…False memories can be created due to external suggestive information, resulting in suggestive false memory, or they can be generated without external misleading information leading to spontaneous false memories (Brainerd et al., 2008; Wang et al., 2018a, 2018b). Recent research has investigated whether the self can amplify spontaneous false memory rates.…”

“…In legal cases, eyewitnesses might receive misinformation about stimuli, which is also much richer than word lists. The misinformation may come from various sources such as the police, the media, and co‐witnesses, possibly resulting in false memories related to the crime (Loftus, 2013; Wang et al., 2018a, 2018b). Research has suggested that false memories induced by the DRM paradigm have different mechanisms with false memories induced by external suggestive information (Patihis et al., 2018; Zhu et al., 2013).…”

How culture shapes constructive false memory.

“…For example, after viewing related items such as robber , bullet, bank, mask, and cashier in a video, around 50% of the people would form a false memory of seeing a related but not presented lure item, i.e., gun , as demonstrated by the Deese-Roediger-McDormott paradigm (DRM; Otgaar, Howe, Brackmann, & Smeets, 2016; Roediger & McDermott, 1995). False memories can have severe consequences when it comes to eyewitness testimony, possibly leading to conviction of innocent people (Wang et al, 2018; Wells et al, 1998). With globalization, legal cases involving witnesses with various cultural backgrounds are increasing, such as cases in multi-cultural countries (e.g., US and South Africa) or cases involving migrants (Anakwah, Horselenberg, Hope, Amankwah-Poku, & van Koppen, 2020).…”