Page 48 - Monocle Quarterly Journal Vol 3 Issue 2 Spring

MONOCLE QUARTERLY JOURNAL | DEEP LEARNING
ELIZABETH LOFTUS
6-foot tall with brown hair and a beard, wearing a light- coloured three-piece-suit, driving what she remembered as a dark blue car with vinyl-covered bucket seats and a temporary number plate beginning with either 776 or 667.
That same night, a young restaurant manager in the Seattle area, Steve Titus, was driving home after a romantic dinner with his fiancé. On the way back to his house, Titus was pulled over by the police and arrested. Unfortunately for Titus, the description of the rapist’s car given by the teenage girl slightly resembled the car he was driving that evening. What made the situation even more dire for Titus, was the fact that his car had temporary paper number plates, since he had bought the car not long before the incident. The final straw was that Steve Titus also rather closely matched the physical description of the perpetrator, being 5 foot 8 inches tall with brown hair and a beard. This left the police little choice but to arrest him based on these similarities.
When given a photo line-up of suspects, the victim pointed out Steve Titus, saying that he was the closest match to what she remembered. Months later in court,
the victim claimed under oath that she was absolutely positive that Titus was the man who had raped her. But he was not. From the start, Titus’ arrest had been a miscarriage of justice. Whilst the rapist was described wearing a three-piece suit, Titus owned no suits. The car that the victim described and the tyre tracks observed by the police were those of a Honda Accord, but Titus drove a new Chevrolet Chevette. Furthermore, witnesses attested to the fact that Titus had been with family, friends, and his fiancé for most of the day and night, making it impossible for him to have been near the scene of the crime at the time it was committed.
The case was rightly overturned and Titus only stayed in jail for one night, but the trauma would weigh heavily on him for years. Shortly after his release, Titus lost his job and broke up with his fiancé, who was disturbed by his extreme bitterness towards the authorities conducting the trial and struggled to cope with the negative turn his life had taken. Titus decided to dedicate his life to suing the state department for damages, but sadly died of a stress-related heart attack shortly before proceedings began, at just 35-years of age.
These types of cases that involve instances of mis- memory or false memories are the specialist domain of Elizabeth Loftus, who cites the Steve Titus example as just one of many times false memories have influenced the outcome of important events. According to Loftus, our memories are very fragile, to the extent that implanting false memories is far more easily achieved than one may think. In one such experiment, Loftus explains that when subjects were shown a video of a car crash, their answers when recalling the scene varied widely. This was especially true when the questions led the subjects to make logical
...our memories are very fragile, to the extent that
implanting false memories
is far more easily achieved than
leaps, asking one sample group, for example, “How fast were the cars going when they bumped into each other?” and then asking the other sample group, “How fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?” In the answers to the second question, the estimated speed
one may think.
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