The Need to Understand the Mutability of Memory
A Video for the Interviewer who Seeks the Truth
The Video is available at Zalma on Insurance on YouTube at https://youtu.be/T3hIbdiCY3Y
It is important to spend time examining how memory influences the information you obtain. Very few people have a perfect eidetic (photographic) memory. Memory is a fluid and often unreliable human function.
During my time as a trainee investigator at the Army Intelligence School at Fort Holabird, Maryland, a classroom lecture on interviewing was interrupted by a man dressed in a clown mask, a tuxedo, swim fins, a cowboy hat, and a purple cummerbund. He ran into the room, screamed epithets, fired a weapon into the ceiling, and ran out. The teacher instructed each member of the class to write down a description of the intruder. None of our descriptions were accurate, and we were all shocked when the shooter was brought back into the class. The noise he made, the firing of a weapon, and the fear the incident engendered made it almost impossible to recall him accurately. Some even described him as having been female.
The professional recognizes that some EUO techniques can cause honest subjects — those who are innocent but “just trying to be helpful” — to “misremember” and provide unreliable, even false, information.
In fact, it has long been known that false memories can be implanted by a process of suggestion, especially when used by skillful but unscrupulous attorneys or interviewers.
Leading questions—where a desired answer is suggested by the way the question is phrased—are a dangerous impediment to fact finding. The true professional, impartial and seeking only the truth, must guard against even inadvertently leading a subject to creating false memories.
Lies and Memory
Evidence shows that the use of a suggestive interrogation technique can be material to the preparation of defense, and the courts have recognized that suggestive interrogation techniques are material to the credibility of prosecution witnesses in United States v. Noel, 581 F.3d 490 (7th Circuit, 09/04/2009), to name one example.
False Memory Syndrome
In Milton’s Paradise Lost, Satan takes on the appearance of an angel and convinces an archangel entrusted with guarding creation to guide him to the Garden of Eden. There, Satan further deceives Adam and Eve and causes the fall of humanity. John Milton used this biblical example of deceit to illuminate the human condition.
The professional interviewer, no matter how experienced, should resist the temptation to believe he or she is a human lie detector. False memories are all too easy to implant, and in their vivid imagery and wealth of detail, they can be indistinguishable from true recollections. Indeed, these memories are experienced as entirely real by those who possess them, and even after their unreliability has been exposed, they function to mask (or have perhaps entirely replaced) any original or true memory.
The professional recognizes that any method of lie detection, including his or her own techniques, requires complete corroboration. Sincerity is what makes the self-deceived deceiver so convincing.