Page 169 - The Social Animal

Social Cognition 151

In her testimony at Hennis’s second trial, Loftus discussed the
nature of reconstructive memory and the way that an interrogation
can lead an observer to construct an imaginary scenario and then be-
lieve that it really happened. Consider the earlier testimony of San-
dra Barnes. At first, she could not recall the presence of anyone at the
automatic teller machine. However, after listening to months of tele-
vision coverage and reading a year’s worth of newspaper stories about
the crime, coupled with the pressure stemming from the fact that she
was the only one who might have seen the real murderer, Barnes re-
constructed a memory of her visit to the bank machine that included
someone who looked like Hennis—in a manner similar to the way the
students recalled a blue car, rather than a green car, in the Loftus ex-
periment. By rehearsing this new construction repeatedly for lawyers
and judges, Barnes came to accept it as fact. It is important to note
that Sandra Barnes was not intentionally lying. She was simply recon-
structing the event. She came to believe what she was saying. Chuck
Barrett’s testimony was tainted in much the same way. Subsequently,
the man he saw the morning of the murder was conclusively identi-
fied as another man on his way to work—not Hennis.
Fortunately for Hennis, his story did not end on death row. On
April 20, 1989, a second jury declared him innocent, noting the ab-
sence of physical evidence linking him to the scene and the weakness
of the eyewitness testimony. In the first trial, Hennis had been vic-
timized by mistaken identification coupled with the jury’s assump-
tion that memory is accurate.
Although the case remains unsolved, off the record, the local po-
lice have indicated that they now have good reason to believe that
the crimes were actually committed by another person: A strikingly
similar rape and murder was committed in a neighboring town while
Hennis was on death row. Shortly after these crimes, both Hennis
and the police received a convincing series of anonymous letters
thanking Hennis for taking the rap for the Eastburn murders.

Autobiographical Memory

It is clear that memory can be reconstructive when it involves quick,
snapshotlike events, such as trying to recall the details of an automo-
bile accident. But what about something more enduring, such as the
recall of our own personal history? Here again, it’s important to