Trivial persuasion in the courtroom: The power of (a few) minor details.

Abstract

Investigated the influence of trivial testimonial detail on judgments of 424 undergraduates who served as mock jurors. Ss read a summary of a court case involving robbery and murder. In Experiment 1, detailed testimony influenced judgments of guilt, even when the detail was unrelated to the culprit. In Experiment 2, detailed testimony was especially powerful when an opposing witness testified that she could not remember the trivial details. Subsequent analyses suggest that the impact of detailed testimony on guilt judgments is mediated by inferences about the eyewitnesses. When eyewitnesses provided more detail, they were generally judged to be more credible, to have a better memory for the culprit's face and for details, and to have paid more attention to the culprit. John Dean, former counsel to President Richard Nixon, testified before the Watergate committee of the United States Senate in 1973. Dean's testimony contained details about dozens of meetings and conversations that took place over a period of several years. Some of Dean's testimony was specific and concrete, as, for example, in the following description of a conversation with Robert Haldeman: I felt I should tell Haldeman that I was going to meet with the prosecutors personally so I called him in California on the morning of April 8 before they departed for Washington. I made the call from Mr. Shaffer's office and when I told him this he said that I should not meet with the prosecutors because, as he said, "once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it's going to be very hard to get it back in." (Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, 1973, 1010) When Dean first testified, some writers were so impressed by his memory for detail that they called him the "human tape recorder" (Neisser, 1981). This anecdote about John Dean raises several important questions. Does the amount of detail a person provides influence listeners' decisions? If so, why are people impressed by detail? The present research addresses these questions using a jury simulation paradigm. Recent research suggests that people are persuaded by testi-This research was supported in part by grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Mental Health. The article is based on a master's thesis completed by Brad E. Bell. We thank Robin Ashley, Lavonne Dorsey, Lisa Hopkins, Traci Sammeth, Cynthia Nielson, and Susan Shriener for assistance with the experiments and manuscript preparation. We also thank Robert Josephs for help with this research, and Harriet Shaklee, Kipling Williams, and seven anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier versions of this article.

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.…”

Retrieval enhances eyewitness suggestibility to misinformation in free and cued recall.

“…Indeed, the course of an investigation can often lead investigators to reassess the relative importance or unimportance of specific pieces of evidence. Second, and perhaps even more importantly, witnesses who incorporate peripheral details into their memory reports are perceived as more credible than those who omit such details (Bell & Loftus, 1988;1989;Wells & Leippe, 1981). Thus, examining potential moderators of RES (such as item centrality) could help to further illuminate its application in legal contexts.…”

Adult Recollections of Childhood Memories: What Details can be Recalled?

“…Interestingly, the study of flashbulb and other types of autobiographical memories shows this widely held belief to be wrong: there is no simple relationship between accuracy and the amount of details, of any type, that can be recalled (Conway, 1994(Conway, , 2005Hirst, et al, 2009;Luminent & Cucri, 2009). The power of the 'specific-details = memory-accuracy' belief was investigated by Bell and Loftus (1989) who found that adding very specific details to accounts of eyewitness memories increased their perceived accuracy -an effect they termed trivial persuasion. The overly-specific memories that adults recall from early childhood are, (Bluck, 2003) are of theoretical interest and most probably relate to the need to create memories that are self-consistent (Conway, 2005) or which, in the examples above depict a positive childhood, one that can survive (minor) adversity.…”