Bad judgements about people can affect our meories of them
- From: "Lance" <LanceGary@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 16 Mar 2006 00:58:20 -0800
Chronicle Online
March 13, 2006
Bad judgments about people can affect memories of them, Cornell study
finds
By Susan S. Lang
Viewing a person as dishonest or immoral can distort memory, a Cornell
study suggests. So much so, that when we attempt to recall that
person's behavior, it seems to be worse than it really was.
"In other words, our study shows that morally blaming a person can
distort memory for the severity of his or her crime or misbehavior,"
said David Pizarro, assistant professor of psychology at Cornell.
Pizarro and three colleagues gave 283 college students a story about a
man who walked out on a restaurant bill, including what the man ate and
drank and the amount of his bill. Half the participants read that the
man walked out on the bill because he "was a jerk who liked to steal,"
and half read that the man left without paying because he received an
emergency phone call.
"One week later the people who were told he was a jerk remembered a
higher bill -- from 10 to 25 percent more than the bill actually was.
Those who were told he had an emergency phone call remembered a
slightly lower-than-actual bill," said Pizarro, the first author of a
study to be published in a forthcoming issue of the journal Memory and
Cognition. His co-authors include University of California
(UC)-Irvine's Elizabeth Loftus, whose groundbreaking work put memory
distortion on the map in the late 1980s when she showed that subjects
viewing a film clip of a car accident estimated the speed of the cars
differently depending on whether such words as hit, collided or mashed
were used in the question.
Previous studies have found that leading questions can influence memory
of an incident, and that thinking that someone is good (or bad) in one
area tends to influence judgments about them in other areas.
"But this is the first study that we know of that looked at how blame
might affect memory regarding objective facts, which you usually think
of as less susceptible to distortion," Pizarro said. "It suggests that
negative evaluations are capable of exerting a distorting effect on
memory as well."
The findings have particular implications for eyewitness testimonies,
Pizarro noted. "Spontaneous evaluations made by an eyewitness about a
defendant may influence their memories about the event in question --
memories that often serve as the very data that judges and juries use
as input into their judgments of guilt."
In addition, eyewitnesses who hear information about the moral
character of a defendant, "even long after the events have occurred,"
may misremember the events in question, such as the severity of the
crime, putting perpetrators at greater risk.
The other co-authors are UC-Irvine graduate students Cara Laney and
Erin Morris.
http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/March06/morality.memory.ssl.html
.
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