The Memory Police

Earlier this year, Chicago prosecutors dropped charges against two boys, ages 7 and 8, who had supposedly confessed to murdering an 11-year-old girl. Later, new evidence hinted that the killer was an adult, and that the confessions had been extracted by improper police interrogation.

In a September issue of The New York Times, psychologists James Wood from the University of Texas-EI Paso and Sena Garvena from the University of Nebraska published an op-ed piece that presented psychological research findings bearing on why coercive interrogations can be so danger to us, especially when used on children. Psychiatrist Robert M. Galatzer-Levy used the same case as a vehicle for telling readers of The Chicago Tribune about research on the questioning of children.

Reading these two excellent essays reminded me that the world presents us with ever-changing events, many of them gripping, upon which our research findings may bear. By relating these events to psychological science, when feasible, and putting our thoughts in print, we accomplish several goals at once (I love efficiency). We educate the public. We remind people of the value of psychological science, and, in the process, we hopefully make a small dent in psychological literacy.

Inspired by what my predecessors did with the Chicago case and the findings in their area of expertise, I decided to try my hand at an op-ed piece on a different subject. It may not be great, but you have to start somewhere. If I don’t find a newspaper outlet, that’s OK, if I’ve led even one of you to try this idea for yourself. – E.L.

We’ve heard a lot of talk about memory lately. Memory for phone calls that were made months earlier–who made the call, where was it made from, who called whom first. Memory for documents that may have been received months or years earlier, and for pivotal business decisions in which one might have been involved. Memory for gifts-what were they, when were they received, and who initiated their return. Memory for sex-who did what, where was it done, who did you tell and when did you tell it?

President Clinton, AI Gore, Monica Lewinsky, Bettie Currie, Vernon Jordan …

They’re all being microscopically examined about events that occurred weeks, months, and even years in the past. They are being pressed for memories that they may not possess now, even if they possessed them at one time. They’re being judged based on assumptions about memory that are questionable at best.

Case in point: The Starr Report advances a theory of memory in numerous places. On details of sexual encounters that occurred between President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky months and years before, it asserts “there can be no contention that one of them has a lack of memory or is mistaken.”

And when questioning Clinton during his August 17,1998, Grand Jury testimony about sexual relations and with whom he discussed them, Prosecutor Sol Wisenberg invoked his memory model: “That is something that one would be likely to remember, right?” Commenting for NBC News during a break in the September public airing of the President’s Grand Jury testimony, Jonathan Turley said that the President had gaps in his memory on points that people would be expected to remember.

To get in the swing of things, you might try right now to remember back to last New Year’s Day-who was the first person you called on the phone? Going back to 1997, did anyone contact you to make a donation for a charity, political effort, or other cause? Who was it? What gifts did you give during the holidays of 1996? And that sexual encounter that you had in 1995-the third one, not the second one-what body part did you touch first?

What should we expect people to remember about the past? Psychological science has now produced a century of research on memory that helps us answer this question.

Memory can be pretty accurate if people have paid attention, not much time has passed, and no suggestive or leading interviews are used to extract the sought-after information.

If you have a standard script that you always follow, then you can use it to produce an accurate report even if you don’t really remember. If you always wear your seat belt and are asked after a nasty accident whether you were wearing one at the time of the crash, you can obviously rely on your scripted knowledge to produce the accurate “Yes I was ‘memory.’” If virtually all weddings involve the verbal expression “I do” then you might readily “remember” that you spoke those words-even decades later. But once we depart from these ideal conditions, our memories become pieces of truth mixed with shards of creation. They can be rich in truth, but also in imagination. We know that memory fades over time for virtually all types of details. Verbatim memory for conversations shows significant declines in a matter of days, even if the core gist of what was said stays around a lot longer.

Even experiences that you think you’d never forget, like sexual ones, are misremembered according to government-sponsored research comparing diary recordings to later recollection. When it comes to all kinds of experiences, people routinely take in information from other sources, such as the media or suggestive questions, and unwittingly allow it to alter, distort or contaminate what is later recalled. What’s worse, when people are pressed hard for details, and pressed again and again, they may dredge up more details to fill in the blank spots in memory. The problem, of course, is they get wrong details alongside the right ones. And the more they go over these newly constructed “memories,” the more confident they can become about them. People will adamantly swear to the truth of details that were vastly different from the way things really were.

There are at least two kinds of truth in this world, which novelist Tim O’Brien has called “happening-truth” (the indisputable reality of what happened) and “story-truth” the personal colorized version of what happened). A respect for the malleability of memory helps us appreciate that when two people’s memory conflict, they can both be telling their own story-truth. Letting things rest with “I don’t remember” sometimes leaves us closer to the happening-truth.

Who decides when there can be a “contention” of lack of memory or mistaken memory? At some point the standard for what people are expected to remember can be set at levels that are unreasonably high. Using the legal system to punish incomplete or erroneous recall in those instances crosses the line to outright harassment.