Page 168 - The Social Animal

150 The Social Animal

unrelated to the eyewitness testimony. Hennis’s lawyers knew that if
they had any chance of overturning his conviction, they would need to
attack the eyewitness testimony placing him at the scene of the crime.
On close scrutiny, it turned out to be very weak evidence. Chuck Bar-
rett had originally told police 2 days after the murders that the man he
saw had brown hair (Hennis is blond) and was 6 feet tall (Hennis is
much taller). Furthermore, when asked to identify Hennis in a photo
lineup, Barrett was uncertain of his judgment. When Sandra Barnes
was first contacted by police a few weeks after the crime, she told them
firmly and emphatically that she had not seen anyone at the bank ma-
chine that day. Why then at the trial had both of these witnesses so
confidently placed Hennis at the scene of the crime? Were they both
liars? No, they were just ordinary people like you and me; their mem-
ory of the events had been leveled and sharpened—constructed,
shaped, and reconstructed— by more than a year of questioning by po-
lice and lawyers.
Elizabeth Loftus, a prominent cognitive psychologist, served as an
expert witness at the second Hennis trial. Loftus had previously con-
ducted a fascinating program of research on reconstructive memory—
investigating how such “suggestive” questioning can influence memory
and subsequent eyewitness testimony. In one of her experiments, 56
Loftus showed subjects a film depicting a multiple-car accident. After
the film, some of the subjects were asked, “About how fast were the
cars going when they smashed into each other?” Other subjects were
asked the same question, but the word smashed was replaced by the
word hit. Subjects who were asked about smashing cars, as opposed to
hitting cars, estimated that the cars were going significantly faster;
moreover, a week after seeing the film, they were more likely to state
(erroneously) that there was broken glass at the accident scene.
Leading questions do not only influence the judgment of facts
(as in the case above), but also can affect the memory of what has
happened. In one of her early studies, Loftus showed subjects a se-
ries of slides depicting an accident involving an automobile and a
pedestrian. In a critical slide, a green car drove past the accident.
57
Immediately after viewing the slides, half the subjects were asked,
“Did the blue car that drove past the accident have a ski rack on the
roof?” The remaining subjects were asked this same question but
with the word blue deleted.Those subjects who were asked about the
“blue” car were more likely to claim incorrectly that they had seen a
blue car. A simple question had altered their memories.