To follow-up our post on Professor Stephen Ceci’s work on child testimony, we thought it would be useful to share a recent lecture Ceci gave to a Psychology 101 class at Cornell.
In the lecture, he discusses five factors that can damage or change a child memory:
- Suggestive questioning.
- Giving false expectations or stereotypes.
- Confirmatory bias, or tendency for people to favor information that confirms their preconceptions.
- Visually-guided imagery.
- High levels of stress
“How can children come to believe something that’s wrong?” Ceci asked.
“When young children, ages 3 and 4, are questioned by neutral interviewers, they do very well. They recall events with 90 percent accuracy,” he explains. “However, when children are repeatedly interviewed over the course of weeks and months with misleading suggestions which sometimes occurs in forensic cases many come to remember the false events as true and provide detailed and coherent narratives about these false events. So compelling did the children’s narratives appear that we suspected that some of the children had come to truly believe they had experienced the fictitious events. Neither parents nor researchers were able to convince 27 percent of the children that the events never happened.”
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