Testing Eye Witness Testimony

Kathryn Schultz:

In 1902, a heated argument between two students in a college classroom turned violent. One of the students pulled a gun on the other, the professor leapt in to try to subdue him, and, in the ensuing chaos, a shot was fired. This was in the days before school shootings were all too common, but even by those bygone standards, this one was particularly unusual: it was fake. The whole thing was choreographed by a professor of criminology at the University Seminary in Berlin named Franz von Liszt. After the putative gunmen was led away, the shaken students were asked to provide individual accounts of what had happened, giving as much detail as possible. Von Liszt then compared their accounts to the actual script of the event, which the actors had followed to the letter.

The results of this study were disturbing then, and they remain so today. The best eyewitnesses got more than twenty-five percent of the facts wrong. The worst erred eighty percent of the time. As another professor who had observed the experiment wrote, “Words were put into the mouths of men who had been silent spectators during the whole short episode; actions were attributed to the chief participants of which not the slightest trace existed; and essential parts of the tragi-comedy were completely eliminated from the memory of a number of witnesses.”

Thousands of experiments done since all show the same thing: eye witnesses cannot be trusted.