David Ruben
Witness testimony is fickle and, all too often, shockingly inaccurate
Being convincing isn’t the same as being accurate. Witness testimony is more fallible than many people assume. The claim that witness testimony is reliable and accurate is testable, and the research is clear that eyewitness identification is vulnerable to distortion without the witness’s awareness. The IMPEACHMENT of President Trump can be measured by state of the art science and objectively proven to be impossible to find Trump guilty of the alleged offenses.
When memory serves as evidence, as it does in many civil and criminal legal proceedings, there are a number of important limitations to the veracity of that evidence. This is because memory does not provide a veridical representation of events as experienced. Rather, what gets encoded into memory is determined by what a person attends to, what they already have stored in memory, their expectations, needs and emotional state.
It is clear that the Democrats, the Whistleblower and the witness’s involved in the Impeachment hearings are people that have emotional issues and biases associated with the desire to inflict damage on Trump.
One of many examples: IN 1984 KIRK BLOODSWORTH was convicted of the rape and murder of a nine-year-old girl and sentenced to the gas chamber—an outcome that rested largely on the testimony of five eyewitnesses. After Bloodsworth served nine years in prison, DNA testing proved him to be innocent. Such devastating mistakes by eyewitnesses are not rare, according to a report by the Innocence Project, an organization affiliated with the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University that uses. How could the witnesses, the jury and the system get it so wrong? What was going on inside the minds of these people that rendered them in such a powerful delusion of Bloodworth’s guilt?
Such illusions can emerge spontaneously in an individual, being created autogenously, defined as “self produced,” or independent of outside influences, or can arise due to the suggestion of another person, being created exogenously. Although the source or origin of these memory illusions/defects might differ, because their memorial consequences are essentially the same, we will use the term false memory to refer to both types of memory illusion.
What gets retrieved later from that memory is determined by that same multitude of factors that contributed to encoding as well as what drives the recollection of the event. Specifically, what gets retold about an experience depends on whom one is talking to and what the purpose is of remembering that particular event (e.g., telling a friend, relaying an experience to a therapist, telling the police about an event).
Moreover, what gets remembered is reconstructed from the remnants of what was originally stored; that is, what we remember is constructed from whatever remains in memory following any forgetting or interference from new experiences that may have occurred across the interval between storing and retrieving a particular experience. Because the contents of our memories for experiences involve the active manipulation (during encoding), integration with pre-existing information (during consolidation), and reconstruction (during retrieval) of that information, memory is, by definition, fallible at best and unreliable at worst.
This fallibility of memory includes not only the omission of details from the original experience, but extends to errors of commission including the creation of memory illusions. This view of memory has emerged over the past few decades of intense scientific research about memory processes, much of which was inspired by memory researchers interacting with the judicial system.
That is, when memory researchers serve as memory experts in the courtroom, new translational questions emerge about the nature of memory particularly as it pertains to memory accuracy for traumatic events. As well, questions arise as to how well people involved in forensic settings understand how memory works. Numerous studies have shown that police, judges, jurors and others involved in the legal system have a number of naïve beliefs about memories, ones that contradict scientific research (e.g., Benton, Ross, Bradshaw, Thomas, & Bradshaw, 2006; Magnussen, Melinder, Raja, & Stridbeck, 2010; Rubin & Bernstein, 2007).
Once examined in the proper light of the intensely negative emotional state of the left, the memory issues based on emotions can be properly evaluated by the Republican committee and exposed, so that the public can see the illusion being foisted on America based on the Hegelian dialectic. In the classic movie “The Manchurian Candidate,” the Chinese Communists brainwash a POW to kill a presidential candidate upon receiving a hypnotic phone message that “awakened” him after being a “sleeper” for years disguised as an “upstanding citizen.” Clearly, the democrat left uses such incidents that happen today as a mechanism to gain more ground through the mainstream news media’s use the “Hegelian Dialectic.”
The Application of the Hegelian Dialectichas only three steps:
• Step one: INVENT A “PROBLEM”: Make an outrageous accusation, propose an absurd theory as if it were truth, (Global Warming) or focus on an issue that already exists and distort it out of all rational proportion.
• Step Two: PROMOTE AND POLARIZE THE “PROBLEM”: Use the news media newspapers, magazines, radio, and television. Elevate the issue to a fever pitch so that soon even people who don’t usually care about politics become drawn in to the conflict and then demand a “solution” to the problem.
• Step Three: OFFER A “SOLUTION”: Through the dialectic any answer always involves either compromise or complete capitulation to a solution that takes away one or more of our rights and further undermines the constitutional protections we all are guaranteed.
The process is designed to turn the unsuspecting mind in the direction of the PROBLEM INVENTOR. The science has shown that by introducing a shock, or crisis of faith collectivle into the victims minds the influence takeover begins to insidiously warp the thought processes of those involved in the process. Of course, the science of memory is an ongoing project, but our current understanding of recollective experiences is that they are fragmentary, contain amnesic gaps, information is often out of order, contain guesses and often contain incorrect details.
Sometimes the incorrect nature of these details are known to the rememberer although oftentimes they are not, having been produced and inserted into the narrative in an automatic fashion, outside of conscious awareness. As the Republicans continue to chip away at the inconsistencies of the witnesses just keep in mind the truth of what you are watching… the attempted overthrow of our constructional democracy by hostile, bad actors using mass mind manipulation to grow their ranks with the collusion of the corrupt media.
[Bio: David Ruben is the Vice-President of “The Foundation of Human Understanding” in Grants Pass. Oregon]
© 2019 David Ruben – All Rights Reserved
E-Mail David Ruben: snowman4848@gmail.com
