One of the most remarkable aspects of Jennifer Thompson’s mistaken identity of Ronald Cotton was her certainty. But research reveals a pervasive cognitive bias toward overconfidence, which is thetendencyfor peopleto betoo certain about their abilityto accuratelyremember events and to makejudgments. David Dunning and his colleagues (Dunning, Griffin, Milojkovic, & Ross, 1990) 1 asked college students to predict how another student would react in various situations. Some participants made predictions about a fellow student whom they had just met and interviewed, and others made predictions about their roommates whom they knew very well. In both cases, participants reported their confidence in each prediction, and accuracy was determined by the responses of the people themselves. The re sults were clear: Regardless of whether they judged a stranger or a roommate, the participants consistently overestimated the accuracy of their own predictions.
Eyewitnesses to crimes are a lso frequently overconfident in their memories, and there is only a small correlation between how accurate and how confident an eyewitness is. The witness who claims to be absolutely certain about his or her identification (e.g., Jennifer Thompson) is not much more likely to be accurate than one who appears much less sure, making it almost impossible to determine whether a particular witness is accurate or not (Wells & Olson, 2003). 2
I am sure that you have a clear memory of when you first heard about the 9/11 attacks in 2001, and perhaps also when you heard that Princess Diana was killed in 1997 or when the verdict of the O. J. Simpson trial was announced in 1995. This type of memory, which we experience along with a great deal of emotion, is known as a flashbulb memory—a vivid and emotional memoryofan unusual event that peoplebelievetheyremember verywell. (Brown & Kulik, 1977). 3
People are very certain of their memories of these important events, and frequently overconfident. Talarico and Rubin (2003) 4 tested the accuracy of flashbulb memories by asking students to write down their memory of how they had heard the news about either the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks or a bout an everyday event that had occurred to them during the same time frame. These recordings were made on September 12, 2001. Then the participants were asked again, either 1, 6, or 32 weeks later, to recall their memories. The participants became less accurate in their recollections of both the emotional event and the everyday events over time. But the participants’ confidence in the accuracy of their memory of learning about the attacks did not decline over time. After 32 weeks the participants were overconfident; they were much more certain about the accuracy of their flashbulb memories than they should have been. Schmolck, Buffalo, and Squire (2000) 5 found similar distortions in memories of news about the verdict in the O. J. Simpson trial.
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