Blog Post #3: Descartes v. Eyewitness Testimony

As anyone who’s seen a re-run of Law and Order or any similar TV crime show can attest, eyewitness testimony often seems to play an important role in the conviction of alleged criminals. But what if eyewitness testimony is inherently less accurate than we think? Rather shockingly, this is the case according to researchers. As Hal Arkowitz and Scott O. Lilienfeld write in an article of the Scientific American, “Many people believe that human memory works like a video recorder: the mind records events and then, on cue, plays back an exact replica of them. On the contrary, psychologists have found that memories are reconstructed rather than played back each time we recall them.” People are confident that their memories represent actual events closely – but, in reality, memories can be unknowingly influenced by a number of factors. Moreover, it’s been found that even highly confident eyewitnesses are usually only marginally more accurate, at best, when compared to less confident eyewitnesses (Arkowitz and Lilienfeld).

This acts as a representative instance of Descartes’ dualism. People place a lot of faith in their mental faculties (in this case, their memory), despite the fact that material reality entails limitations to the mind’s capabilities. In fact, the factors that can play a role in influencing eyewitnesses’ memories include: how the memory was asked to be recalled, the level of stress the witness was under during the crime, and racial differences between the witness and suspect (Arkowitz and Lilienfeld). These factors represent a limitation of the body – in that the physical brain (i.e. not the mind, or consciousness) can be easily manipulated by external forces because of the way that it functions – specifically reconstructing, and not replaying, events. That people (both witnesses and juries) seemingly, by intuition, accept the mind’s beliefs (i.e. memories) as more valid than the potential for these external factors to influence those memories, as well as more valid than the way that the physical brain operates – despite the scientific studies and personal anecdotal evidence to the contrary (can’t you remember a time you swore something happened a specific way, only to learn that you were wrong?) – demonstrates the resonating effect of Descartes’ philosophy in our society, which places mind over body. Additionally, this is ironic, however, since Descartes himself was wary of empirical evidence (e.g., eyewitness testimony) due to the possibility that his conceptual “evil demon” might manipulate the individual into believing certain things to be true, and he thus preferred to rely instead on rationalist evidence, or absolute facts. Thus, even though Descartes would likely rather we treat eyewitness testimony with suspicion – because we view memories as being recorded by our infallible minds, and because absolute facts are hard to come by in a legal context, courts of law often rely, at least partly, on eyewitness testimony.

In this sense, our society might do better (seeing as how inaccurate eyewitness accounts have contributed to over 75% of wrongful convictions in the U.S.) (Reiss) to question the Descartes-influenced, intuitive inclination to which we seem to be subject that leads us to believe so steadfastly in the reliability of our memories. Or rather, we might do better to approach Cartesian thinking in a more nuanced way, being as wary as Descartes would be in not so readily accepting empirical evidence, such as eyewitness testimony.

Works Cited

Arkowitz, Hal, and Scott O. Lilienfeld. “Why Science Tells Us Not to Rely on
       Eyewitness Accounts.”Scientific American, Scientific American, a Division of
       Nature America, Inc., 1 Jan. 2010, www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-the-eyes-
       have-it/.

Reiss, Ruth. “Wrongfully Convicted by an Inaccurate Eyewitness.” ABC News, ABC
       News Network, 25 Mar. 2008,
       abcnews.go.com/Primetime/WhatWouldYouDo/story?id=4521253.