Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] While we're talking about the Reliability of Eyewitnesses by Bart D. Ehrman, read by John Paul Middlesworth after posting on the surprisingly good eyewitness testimony to the miracles of the founder of Hasidic Judaism, the Besht, yesterday, I couldn't resist saying a bit more about it. Not from a purely anecdotal perspective, but from the academic perspective of scholars engaged in actual research on the matter.
[00:00:27] Research that is virtually ignored by conservative Christian biblical scholars who have written entire books on eyewitness testimony but appear to know very little about it as a phenomenon.
[00:00:37] Here's another excerpt from my book devoted to the issue Jesus before the Gospels, Harper 1, 2016 in the history of memory studies, an important event occurred in 1902 in Berlin. A well known criminologist named von List was delivering a lecture when an argument broke out.
[00:00:56] One student stood up and shouted that he wanted to show how the topic was related to Christian ethics. Another got up and yelled that he would not put up with that. The first one replied that he had been insulted. A fight ensued and a gun was drawn. Professor List tried to separate the two and the gun went off.
[00:01:14] The rest of the students were aghast, but professor von List informed them that the event had been staged.
[00:01:20] He chose a group of the students to write down an exact account of what they had just seen. The next day, other students were instructed to write down what they recalled. Others a week later.
[00:01:30] The results of these written reports were surprising and eye opening. This was one of the first empirical studies of eyewitness testimony.
[00:01:38] Professor List broke down the sequence of events, which had been carefully planned in advance into a number of stages. He then calculated how accurately the students reported the sequence step by step.
[00:01:50] The most accurate accounts were in error in 26% of the details they reported.
[00:01:55] Others were in error as much as 80%.
[00:01:59] As you might expect, research on the reliability of eyewitness testimony has developed significantly over the years since this first rather crude attempt to establish whether it can be trusted to be reliable.
[00:02:10] Scholarship in the field has advanced in recent decades, but the findings are consistent in one particularly important A report is not necessarily accurate because it is delivered by an eyewitness.
[00:02:22] On the contrary, eyewitnesses are notoriously inaccurate.
[00:02:27] There have been many books written about whether the Gospels were written by eyewitnesses or by authors relying on eyewitnesses.
[00:02:34] Some of these books are written by very smart people. It is very odd indeed that many of them do not appear to be particularly concerned with knowing what experts have told us about eyewitness testimony.
[00:02:46] This is independent of the question of whether the Gospels do include eyewitness testimony or not, even if they do research on eyewitness testimony.
[00:02:56] Psychological studies of eyewitness testimony began to proliferate in the 1980s, in part because of two important phenomena related to criminal investigations.
[00:03:05] The first is that people started recalling ugly, painful, and criminal instances of sexual abuse when they were children.
[00:03:12] These recollections typically surfaced during the process of therapy, especially under hypnosis.
[00:03:18] Both those who suddenly remembered these instances and the therapists treating them often maintained that these repressed memories explained why the patients had experienced subsequent psychological damage.
[00:03:29] Some of these reports involved incest committed by relatives, especially parents. Others involved abuse by other adults, for example, in childcare centers. As reports of such memories began to proliferate, some psychologists started to wonder if they could all be true.
[00:03:46] Some were obviously real memories of real events. But was it possible that others were not true memories at all, but false memories that have been unconsciously implanted during the process of therapy?
[00:03:58] It turns out that the answer is a resounding yes, which creates enormous complexities and problems for all parties, the victim or alleged victim, the therapist, the accused adults, and the judges and juries of the legal system.
[00:04:13] The other phenomenon involved the use of DNA evidence to overturn criminal convictions.
[00:04:18] Once DNA became a reliable indicator of an accused person's direct involvement in serious crimes such as murder or rape, a large number of previous convictions were brought back for reconsideration.
[00:04:30] Numerous convictions were overturned.
[00:04:33] As Harvard psychologist Daniel Schachter has recently indicated, in about 75% of these reversed judgments, the person charged with the crime was convicted solely on the basis of eyewitness testimony. What is one to make of such findings?
[00:04:48] In the words of a seminal article in the field, reports by eyewitnesses are among the most important types of evidence in criminal as well as in civil law cases. It is therefore disturbing that such testimony is often inaccurate or even entirely wrong.
[00:05:05] This particular indictment emerged out of a study unrelated to DNA evidence.
[00:05:10] It involves an interesting but tragic case.
[00:05:13] On October 4, 1992, an L Al Boeing 707 that had just taken off from Schipfel Airport in Amsterdam lost power and two engines. The pilot tried to return to the airport but couldn't make it. The plane crashed into an 11 story apartment building in the Amsterdam suburb of Bilmermere. The four crew members and 39 people in the building were killed.
[00:05:36] The crash was understandably the leading news story in the Netherlands for days.
[00:05:41] Ten months later, in August 1993, Dutch psychology professor Hans Krombag and two colleagues gave a survey to 193 university professors, staff and students in the country. Among the questions was the did you see the television film of the moment the plane hit the apartment building?
[00:06:00] In their responses, 107 of those surveyed, 55% said yes, they had seen the film.
[00:06:07] Sometime later, the researchers gave a similar survey with the same question to 93 law school students.
[00:06:13] In this instance, 62, which is 66% of the respondents, indicated that they had seen the film. There was just one problem.
[00:06:23] There was no film.
[00:06:25] These striking results obviously puzzled the researchers, in part because basic common sense would have told anyone that there could not have been a film.
[00:06:33] Remember, this is 1992. Before cell phone cameras, the only way to have a film of the event would have been for a television camera crew to have trained a camera on this particular apartment building in a suburb of Amsterdam at this exact time in expectation of an imminent crash.
[00:06:49] And yet, between half and two thirds of the people surveyed, most of them graduate students and professors, indicated they had seen the the non existent film.
[00:07:00] Why would they think they had seen something that didn't exist?
[00:07:04] Even more puzzling were the detailed answers that some of those interviewed said about what they actually saw in the film. For example, whether the plane crashed into the building horizontally or at vertical, and whether the fire caused by the plane started at impact or only later.
[00:07:19] None of that information could have been known from a film because there was no film.
[00:07:24] So why did these people remember not only seeing the crash, but also details about how it happened and what happened immediately afterward?
[00:07:33] Obviously, they were imagining it based on logical inferences. The fire must have started right away, and on what they had been told by others, the plane crashed into the building as it was heading straight down.
[00:07:44] The psychologists argued that these people's imaginations became so vivid and were repeated so many times that they eventually did not realize they were imagining something.
[00:07:55] They thought they were remembering it. They really thought that in fact they did remember it. But it was a false memory. Not just a false memory. One of them had a false memory. Most of them had.
[00:08:07] The researchers concluded, it is difficult for us to distinguish between what we have actually witnessed and what common sense inference tells us. That must also have been the case.
[00:08:19] In fact, common sense inference, along with information that we get from hearsay by others together conspire in distorting an eyewitness's memory. Indeed, this is particularly easy when, as in our studies, the event is of a highly dramatic nature, which almost by necessity evokes strong and detailed visual imagery.
[00:08:42] The witnesses to the life of Jesus certainly were recalling events of a highly dramatic nature.
[00:08:48] Jesus walking on the water, calming the storm with a word, casting out a demon, raising a young girl back to life.
[00:08:55] Moreover, these stories certainly evoked strong and detailed visual imagery.
[00:09:01] Even if such stories were told by eyewitnesses, could we trust that they were necessarily accurate memories?
