Much of the commentary on the recent Kavanaugh controversy has simply assumed that if two people tell inconsistent stories about a long ago event, one of them must be lying. I noted in this post a week ago why that is not necessarily so. Sometimes people simply remember things wrong, especially at long time intervals. A person can be fully candid in a statement of how he or she remembers an event and still say things that are factually incorrect.
This morning Prof. Richard MacKenzie of UC Irvine has this op-ed in the WSJ with the above title:
The more remote a memory is in time, the less reliable it tends to be, partly because of decay and partly because recalled memories can be corrupted by new information. New and old memories can be conflated, sometimes emerging as totally false memories. Memories can be warped by leading questions from therapists, lawyers, journalists or others.
My colleague Elizabeth Loftus was able to "implant" false memories in a significant subset of laboratory subjects by showing them an official-looking poster of Disney characters, including Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny. Many subjects later remembered meeting Bugs Bunny on a childhood trip to Disneyland. Some of them even reported that Bugs had touched them inappropriately.
That was impossible. Bugs Bunny isn't a Disney character.* * *Pundits have drawn a line between Judge Kavanaugh and his accusers, and insisted Americans take sides. But there is a third way: Remain agnostic until you know whether the accusations are backed by independent corroborating evidence. Without corroboration the public--and members of congressional committees--can't know whether a memory is authentic or is a product of some other process.
