Scott Fraser on why eyewitnesses get it wrong

-
This is a talk from Scott Fraser, a forensic psychologist, on why eyewitness testimony is so terribly unreliable. This talk centers on criminal cases, but it may bring to mind a certain deity – the written accounts of whom its followers claim are based on eyewitness testimony some four decades earlier.



Update: some alert readers have pointed out that, in a massive dose of irony, Fraser is wrong about the second WTC tower footage; there was a great deal of live coverage of both towers collapsing.

It is likely that Fraser meant to refer to this study, which shows false memories of the first plane hitting the first tower. That's the footage that wasn't broadcasted until a day later.

Given that TED has a considerable delay before they post these talks online, I'm rather surprised they still put it up despite the error.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Christianity is bullshit, part 1: The Bible is stupid

-
Imagine that you were the perfect, omnipotent, all-knowing Lord and Creator of the universe. You decided that you were going to give one -- just one -- book to humanity. It would be their moral compass, an insight into their nature and into yours, and act as a guide for how they could live rightly and walk a path that would lead their souls into an eternity with you. Obviously, the first thing you'd want to put in there are some totally unscientific, archaic behavioral codes for menstruating women, and for pregnant women after they give birth. You'd want to be sure to help them regulate slavery, and specify how badly they were allowed to beat their slaves. And of course you'd want the book to be chock full of mythology -- a creation myth, a flood myth, a fictional exodus, and hagiographical stories about how your loyal armies killed the shit out of everyone who dared to worship the wrong gods. There's a point here about the Bible that, in my estimation, really canno
Read more...

Why Christianity is bullshit, part 2: The Bible isn't true

-
In part 1, I pointed out the absurdity of believing that the Bible is the divinely inspired word of God. That leads to closely related, but no less important point: most of what is in the Bible is simply not true . And in some cases, that actually impacts Christian theology rather profoundly. Adam and Eve did not exist. Overwhelming evidence from every field of biology points to humans evolving from a population of no fewer than 10,000 individuals. Any way you slice it, it's simply impossible that we can from one man and one woman. That's not an innocuous detail, either: the entirety of Christian theology is built upon Adam and Eve being real people. I'm fond of this quote from Pastor Tim Keller: “[Paul] most definitely wanted to teach us that Adam and Eve were real historical figures. When you refuse to take a biblical author literally when he clearly wants you to do so, you have moved away from the traditional understanding of the biblical authority.  If Adam d
Read more...

There is no such thing as sophisticated theology

-
Image
I often roll my eyes when atheists indulge "sophisticated" theological arguments. There's a belief among some atheists that Dawkins and other "new atheists" didn't engage with religious philosophy seriously enough, and that there needs to be a newer, better dressed atheism that indulges in the purportedly more nuanced and complex arguments for theism.   The problem is that without exception, every "sophisticated" argument for theism I've ever seen is couched in the same bad assumptions as the less-sophisticated ones. There is no such thing as a sophisticated philosophical argument that is based on (to name a few) Aristotelian metaphysics, substance dualism, unembodied minds, or transcendent causation. All of these concepts are absurd and false.   It's not that I don't think we should talk to theists at all; absolutely we should. But we should be very careful about the framing of the questions and be quick to identify spurious assumption
Read more...