Recovered memories are almost always false memories’. Critically discuss this assertion through reference to research and practice in counselling and forensic psychology.
Task: To produce an essay based on Block 5
Recovered memories are almost always false memories’. Critically discuss this assertion through reference to research and practice in counselling and forensic psychology.
Word limit: 2000 words.
Focus of the assignment
TMA 05 is intended to assess your skills in discussing practice and research in counselling and forensic psychology and to employ appropriate evidence to construct an argument and draw conclusions. For this assignment you have a choice of writing an essay based either on topics covered in Week 25 on ‘Prevention’ or topics covered in Week 22 on ‘Memory’.
The question invites you to consider whether a statement has evidence to support its claim or not. You can construct an argument that might favour one position more than another, but you should try to provide a balanced evaluation and not be dismissive of the opposite view.
For this TMA, it is important that you draw on additional material beyond that contained within the module website and textbook; this must consist of at least two articles that you have found through a citation search that you have conducted in Week 25 Activity 3.2.
REFERENCING MUST BE ……….. CITE THEM RITE- HARVARD STYLE
The most relevant module materials are listed in the following pages. Remember that you should also find relevant material through your independent studies, and can include material from elsewhere in the module if you think it is relevant to the question.
You are advised to be careful not to include too much background history and description in your essay. The focus should be on critically evaluating the evidence, ideas and research that is directly relevant to the essay question.
Relevant material
False and recovered memories
- The most relevant module materials are listed in the following pages. Remember that you should also find relevant material through your independent studies, and can include material from elsewhere in the module if you think it is relevant to the question.
- You are advised to be careful not to include too much background history and description in your essay. The focus should be on critically evaluating the evidence, ideas and research that is directly relevant to the essay question.
Chapter 17 • As Chapter 17 ‘Memory’ (pages 253–266 in Mad or Bad: A Critical Approach to Counselling and Forensic Psychology) focuses on the debate about false and recovered memories, the whole chapter is relevant. Be careful not to include too much background history and description in your essay, and instead focus on the evidence, ideas and research that is directly relevant to the essay question. You will find the chapter frames the debate between false memories and recovered memories as ‘the memory wars’. You will find a great deal of relevant material here.
Week 22 • The key materials from Week 22 are located in Section 2 The Memory Wars?, which discusses the nature of the debate about recovered memories and false memories. It might be useful to note the significance of all this to the criminal justice system and how the media have played a key role. These elements are discussed further in Section 2.2 ‘Discussing the Memory Wars’, particularly in the audio where two experts provide their take on the debate. We strongly suggest listening to this audio as it provides a useful insight into the debate. Section 2.1 ‘Experimenting with False Memories’ is also useful in that it provides an example of the type of methods used to explore the phenomenon of false memories.
Week 22 info
This week we will be exploring one role that memory plays in therapy, and that has particular consequences when considered in forensic contexts. Many people seek therapy because they are experiencing difficulties, such as emotional problems or feelings of not being able to cope effectively with others or everyday life, but are not aware of what the cause of these difficulties might be. The therapeutic process explores the difficulties the person is experiencing and the client and therapist work together to help the client improve their well-being, which can involve trying to locate the cause of any problems. In some cases, this can involve recovering memories, often from childhood, that the client had repressed due to the original event being traumatic. Childhood sexual abuse is an example of such a trauma, and one that has received considerable attention from therapists, researchers and the media. In this week of the module we will focus on recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse, that usually involve a family member or other adult known to the child, and the debate that has surrounded them (so please do bear in mind what we said in the Block 5 introduction about considering how you engage with the material).
Although uncovered through the therapeutic process, and subsequently forming part of the therapy, these memories are of a criminal act. If the client alerts the police to the offence, and they decide to investigate, the memories of the client that were originally part of the therapeutic process are now also the basis of formal evidence within the criminal justice system. This week we explore what happens when these two quite different systems with very different aims are brought together.
During this week, you will:
- read and makes notes on Chapter 17 from the textbook Mad or Bad: A Critical Approach to Counselling and Forensic Psychology
- listen to an audio discussion about the memory wars
- watch videos and take part in activities about memory in cases where the perpetrator is not known by the victim.
1.1 The nature of human memory
Before you get going with this week, it is worth revising a little of what psychological research has told us about human memory (or being introduced to it if you have not studied the psychology of memory before). Our subjective experience of memory is often that we either remember something accurately, whether it be a name, event or fact, or are unable to bring the information to mind. In essence, we might see our memory as being very similar to that of a computer, but one that occasionally takes a while to find a specific piece of data, or fails to find it at all. Although this might be how we experience memory, it is most decidedly not how it actually works.
Unlike a computer, who we are has a significant impact on how we see the world around us and an even larger impact on how we remember it. It is entirely possible for two people to view the same scene or read the same paragraph and remember different things. It is also possible for us to form memories of events that we did not experience or that did not happen. The reason for this is that human memory is based upon interpreting and understanding the world around us, while a computer stores information in its raw form and does not need to understand it first.
This was demonstrated neatly in a classic psychological study conducted by Frederic Bartlett in 1932. Bartlett asked participants to read and remember a Native American folk tale called ‘The War of the Ghosts’, and not only found that people often recalled details incorrectly, but sometimes remembered something that was not part of the original story at all (Bartlett, 1932). Bartlett suggested these errors were because the participants were interpreting the information they read based on their own cultural background, and that this caused them to remember the meaning of the story as they understood it, rather than the words as they were written. He suggested that memory was ‘reconstructive’ in nature, which is to say that our memories are not perfect representations of what we experienced, read or learned in the past, but instead are affected by:
- who we are and how our identities and previous experiences affect how we see the world
- what we have learned that is of relevance to the information in question since we first encountered it
- the conditions under which we are trying to recall the information.
Such an approach undoubtedly helps us to make sense of the world and to predict what will happen based on previous experience, but can cause significant problems for the criminal justice system when trying to use human memory to provide evidence in an investigation and trial.
At this point we invite you to read Chapter 17 ‘Memory’, pages 253–266 in Mad or Bad: A Critical Approach to Counselling and Forensic Psychology. As you read, make some notes as this will help you with the online activities in this week.
When you go on to read about ‘The Memory Wars’ through your independent studies, you will not usually see the question mark that we have used in the title of this section. We have included it here as we do not want to take for granted that this debate can, or should, be characterised as a war.
Although it provides a catchy and provocative title, it can be unhelpful in describing two different approaches as being completely at odds with one another, when the reality is that the relationship between any two perspectives dealing with the same issue will always be more complex, and involve agreement and complementarity as well as disagreement. However, it is also clear that for some individuals, whether client, therapist or researcher, the experience of the recovered vs false memory debate may well have seemed war-like. Indeed, even some of the researchers involved peripherally in the debate had a very stressful time as a result. Our suggestions for independent study include the experiences of James Coan, one of the students that assisted Elizabeth Loftus with the famous ‘Lost in the Mall’ study (Loftus and Pickrell, 1995) described in Information Box 17.1 in the Memory chapter.
A second problem with the conceptualisation of the debate as a ‘war’ is that this tends to conjure an image of two sides, when arguably there are at least four in this case, all with different goals and agendas. As you read in Chapter 17 ‘Memory’, at the heart of the debate are therapists working with adult clients who recover memories of childhood sexual abuse and academic researchers working with the false memory paradigm. However, one should not underestimate the role of the formal criminal justice system, both police forces and courts, nor the impact of the media. The adversarial nature of UK and, particularly, US court systems can tend to polarise expert opinion. Even when guidelines and systems attempt to mitigate such polarisation, defence teams will tend to select experts and evidence that will acquit their client, whilst prosecution teams will do the opposite. Elements of the press, and unfortunately often those that account for the largest audiences, also tend to polarise debates to create stories that follow easy to understand narratives and to produce sensationalist headlines.
Although the Loftus and Pickrell (1995) ‘Lost in the Mall’ study is probably the most iconic, and powerful, demonstration of implanting a false memory in an experimental setting, it requires a great deal of research about the individual participants, not to mention several interviews. Unfortunately, these practical concerns mean we cannot use the study as a demonstration that you could participate in. Instead, Activity 1 gives you the opportunity to take part in a much simpler experiment on memory based on the Deese, Roediger and McDermott (DRM) paradigm (Roediger and McDermott, 1995).
The DRM paradigm demonstrates that people can remember things (in this case a word) that they did not see, and also be confident that they had seen it. Obviously, there is a world of difference between memory of a word and memory of a more complex event, such as childhood sexual abuse.
The Loftus and Pickrell (1995) study uses more complex stimuli and methodology and does find that people are suggestible to forming false memories of entire events. Given the limitations that ethics places on research, such studies are probably as close as controlled experimentation will ever get to replicating the scenario involved in recovered memories.
As well as issues of realism, it is important to remember that the relevant experiments are designed to study how suggestible our memories might be. However, it is not common practice for a therapist to suggest to a client that they may have been sexually abused, and indeed it is a myth that therapy works along such lines.
The gulf of difference between the experience of someone recovering memories of sexual abuse in therapy and of remembering events in an experiment has, and continues to be, one of the central issues in the memory wars.
Eyewitness memory
Our exploration of memory has, so far, focused on adult clients who recover memories of childhood sexual abuse in therapy, but this is just one type of offence, and memory is an important component in many others too. Indeed, the experiments conducted using the false memory paradigm are part of a much larger body of research that has attempted to assess the accuracy of human memory in relation to a broad array of crimes and criminal investigation.
In addition to the involvement of a therapeutic setting and the length of time that had passed between the (alleged) offence and any subsequent investigation, another aspect that tends to differentiate recovered memories from other uses of memory in the criminal justice system is that the perpetrator is usually known to the victim. In such cases, the identity of the perpetrator is not in question and the investigation focuses on whether that person did, or did not, commit the alleged crime. This is also the case in any sexual or physical assault in which perpetrator and victim know one another. If the victim does not know the perpetrator, however, then one of the most important elements of the investigation is determining the identity of the perpetrator.
Psychological research has contributed a great deal to our understanding of how accurately an eyewitness (whether a victim or bystander) can recall the details of a crime, particularly the accuracy with which they can identify the perpetrator. Unfortunately, the overwhelming conclusion from such research is that human memory is not a reliable source of information, and that witnesses are prone to identifying the wrong person.
Research on eyewitness identification has found witnesses to be susceptible to suggestion. In the activity above you may have found yourself wanting to pick someone from the line-up simply because you were given the instruction ‘Who is it?’, which suggests that the perpetrator was one of the images, even though it wasn’t. Some of the earliest research in this area, for example Loftus and Palmer (1974), examined such suggestibility, which helps us to understand why it was that the same researchers thought it possible that memories recovered during therapy might not be accurate.
One of the most emotive elements of the debate over recovered and false memories involves balancing the rights of the victim and the accused. We have seen previously in the course that the justice gap means that far too many victims of sexual abuse are let down by the criminal justice system as their cases are not investigated fully. A typical component of a high proportion of such cases, and of cases involving recovered memories, is that the alleged perpetrator is someone known to the victim. The matter then becomes one of whether the accused did commit the crime.
As we explored through the eyewitness identification task in Activity 3, remembering the identity of a perpetrator not known to the victim or other witness can be difficult. An important question then becomes ‘how often does inaccurate eyewitness memory lead to an innocent person being convicted of a crime they did not commit?’, and this is the question we will address in the next activity.
In the following activity, you are provided with eight factors that have contributed to wrongful convictions (based on data from research conducted by Scheck, Neufeld and Dwyer, 2000). Can you work out which is the most problematic?
Of course, the data in Activity 4 indicates the relative frequency with which various factors lead to an innocent person being convicted, which is not the same as knowing how often miscarriages of justice occur. Calculating this latter figure is extremely problematic, because it would essentially require retrying every case again, but somehow utilizing a procedure less error prone than that used by the court system. Either that, or inventing a time machine to discover who committed the crime and how it took place.
Attempts have been made to look at the accuracy of specific types of evidence, including eyewitness identification evidence. Clark and Godfrey (2009), estimate that 20% (or 1 in 5) of suspects placed in an eyewitness identification procedure (such as a lineup) are innocent of the crime they are being accused of. Surprisingly, the views of the police produce a similar estimate, with a survey of officers involved in obtaining eyewitness identification evidence finding that the average estimate was that 21% of suspects appearing in identification procedures were innocent (Pike and Harrison, 2015).
The Innocence Project is a US organisation dedicated to exonerating wrongfully convicted individuals through DNA testing. Many of their cases involve an investigation conducted prior to the standard use of forensic DNA testing, but where physical evidence still exists which can now be analysed. Using this technique, at the time of writing The Innocence Project has aided 348 successful exonerations, including 14 who served on death row. The average time served in prison was 14 years.
Below you will watch a video featuring Jennifer Thompson-Cannino, a rape victim whose identification evidence helped send an innocent person, Ronald Cotton, to prison for more than 10 years. Ronald was later exonerated with help from The Innocence Project. Jennifer has since become a campaigner against wrongful convictions and her story is a powerful illustration of how dangerous it can be to rely on evidence provided by an eyewitness. Please bear in mind three things:
- to remember to go gently as you engage with this material, and bear in mind the advice at the beginning of the block
- that Jennifer did not know her attacker, and this case is about the problems of eyewitness identification and is not about issues to do with the justice gap and victims of sexual offences who know their attackers
- that we are in no way placing any blame on Jennifer for the wrongful conviction. The video also features one of the detectives involved in the case, and we are likewise not blaming him. Indeed, the video and activity are not about blame, and should we think in that direction it is clear that the fault lies broadly with the construction of our justice system and modes of investigation and conviction.
Watch the interview with the victim/witness in the Cotton Case.
The Cotton Case
One can only admire Jennifer’s bravery in putting herself in the public eye in order to draw attention to the problem of wrongful convictions. We would suggest that if you have time, that now would be a useful moment to explore The Innocence Project as part of your independent studies, and discover more about miscarriages of justice and how they occur. You can also use the website to find out more about The Cotton Case.
Hopefully the activities and research we have explored so far this week has shown you how dangerous it can be to rely on eyewitness identification evidence. This may have come as no surprise to you, after all, if you watch crime fiction on TV or read crime novels, you would be forgiven for thinking that contemporary investigations rely on forensic evidence!
Remember, though, that the analysis of miscarriages of justice which showed misidentification to be a factor in 75% of such cases, also showed that forensic science featured in 23% of the wrongful convictions. This may appear to be a surprising result given the way forensic science is portrayed in crime fiction. As you will see in Activity 5, the issue is that many forensic techniques still rely on the opinion of a human expert, and others are not based on sound scientific principles.
As you saw from Activity 5, the evidence used in criminal investigations and trials is not as reliable as we are led to believe from crime fiction. The discrepancy between fact and fiction has led legal professionals and researchers to refer to the ‘CSI Effect’, wherein juror’s knowledge of forensic science gained from crime fiction may lead them to overestimate its reliability, leading to a tendency to convict if any forensic science is presented by the prosecution and to acquit if none is used.
Summary of Week 22
This week we explored how memory is important in both therapeutic and forensic justice settings, and focused on the tensions and problems that can occur when memories that are first recalled as part of therapy are then used as evidence in the criminal justice system.
An additional dichotomy explored was that between recovered and false memories, which not only speaks to tensions between therapy and criminal evidence, but between how memory is conceptualised by counselling psychologists and experimental psychologists. Part of this dichotomy involves a differential focus on the rights of victims and those accused, although whether the victim and alleged offender knew each other or were strangers is a key element when exploring this dichotomy. When the perpetrator is unknown to the victim, any subsequent investigation often relies on the memory of the victim to establish the identity of the perpetrator. Psychological research has revealed that our memories are frequently not accurate enough to provide reliable evidence in this regard, though other forms of identification using forensic science can also be error prone.
5 Independent study
Lost in a shopping mall
You can read about the experiences of James Coan in the Memory Wars through an article he authored: Lost in a Shopping Mall: An Experience With Controversial Research.
You might also want to follow up some of the references made in the article.
The Innocence Project
Explore the website of The Innocence Project, which is an invaluable source of information on miscarriages of justice: The Innocence Project.
Identifying Ivan
Although published in 1988, meaning the coverage of research and practise is now rather dated, the book ‘Identifying Ivan’ nonetheless remains a seminal and fascinating read. It describes the experiences of Willem Wagenaar (a Dutch psychologist and expert on identification) who gave expert testimony for the defense in the trial of John Demjanjuk, who was accused by an Israeli court of being Ivan the Terrible, and sentenced to death for crimes against humanity including the murder of 850,000 Jews in Treblinka.
Wagenaar, W.A. (1988). Identifying Ivan: A case study in legal psychology, Harvard University Press.