Think You'd Remember the Face of Your Torturer? Think Again

[n2doc]

HICAGO — Imagine you've just been through a Guantanamo-style interrogation by a man in a prisoner-of-war camp. You're sitting in an isolation cell, when another of your captors bursts in the door, brandishing a photo of a man, and asking, "Did your interrogator give you anything to eat?" The man leaves, but later as your ordeal is ending, you're asked to pick out your interrogator from nine faces.

Surely, his image would be burned into your memory, right?

Wrong.

Using data from soldiers in a mock prisoner-of-war exercise within the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape programs of the U.S. military, new research shows that eighty-five percent of soldiers chose the man in the photograph — who was not involved in any way — instead of the man who'd actually subjected them to what the military calls a "very stressful interrogation" that could have included a variety of physically demanding tasks and some violence.

In other words, soldiers undergoing mock interrogations can be tricked by simple psychological techniques into misidentifying their interrogator. Combined with other research carried out by Elizabeth Loftus at the University of California, Irvine, psychologists are closing in on the exact procedures for creating false memories in individuals in a wide variety of circumstances.
"It can be said that we're on the brink of having a recipe for how we go about developing a false memory," Loftus told a packed lecture hall here at the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences annual meeting on Saturday.

more:
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/02/falsememory.html

[Orrex]

1. Alan Alda participated in a much more benevolent experiment about a decade ago

As part of his involvement with the Scientific American tv program.

I don't recall the specifics (ironically?), but the gist was this: he watched a film of a young couple having a picnic. Shortly thereafter, he was shown a series of photographs closely duplicating the picnic scene but with slight alterations, such as the presence of a red frisbee or a plastic cooler, though he wasn't told that these were post hoc additions. After that, he was asked a number of questions about the scene.

Almost invariably he "rememebered" seeing the added items in the actual picnic scene, and he was amazed to learn that his mind had conflated the original scene with the photos, to the point that he truly couldn't distinguish them.


This strikes me as similar to what's going on in the wake of torture. The photo of man is inserted into the prisoner's memory because of the extremity of the moment and the similarity of the context, I think.

Very interesting and very disturbing. It would seem to offer a nearly fool-proof way for an individual to give himself plausible deniability or at least to create a "reasonable doubt" sufficient to foil subsequent criminal prosecution.