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[ ♪INTRO ] It’s lunch time and you’re sitting around a table, chatting and laughing with your friends as other people pass through the kitchen. But when one of your coworkers goes to get their lunch from the fridge… it’s gone. Someone took it. They ask you if you saw anything, to try and get to the bottom of this mystery. But how accurate is your memory of what happened? Whether it’s a missing lunch or something bigger, eyewitness testimony can be really important when it comes to crime. But our memories aren’t always so great. So there are predictable ways that eyewitness reports can become less accurate, and ways we can prevent that. Psychologists know that our memories aren’t perfect. We don’t recall every detail, like watching back a YouTube video of what happened. Our brains piece memories back together when we need them, and even the most vivid ones can have missing or wrong information. Like what color is the pillsbury doughboy’s scarf? It’s blue, right? No, it’s white. I just put it in your mind that it was blue. One way memories can become contaminated is when misinformation gets added in, often without you realizing. This can happen because of the way a question gets asked, or by listening to other reports of the event. A classic study published in 1974 by researchers at the University of Washington was one of the first to test how the wording of questions affects eyewitness testimony. Specifically, they were looking into leading questions. They had 150 undergrads come to a lab, watch a video of a car accident, and then answer questions about it. And one key question affected their responses. Some participants were asked “How fast were the cars going when they hit each other?” while others were asked “How fast were the cars going when they smashed each other?” Those who heard “smashed” estimated the cars were going a little faster. And a week later, when asked if there was any broken glass, those who heard “smashed” were more likely to say yes when there wasn’t any. So the way this leading question was phrased seemed to affect their memories. Talking with other witnesses can also muddle things. A study published in 2017 by researchers from California State University had 289 undergrads watch a video of a carjacking in groups of five, then report what they saw one at a time. Two people per group were actually double-agents. They were trained to say certain things, including the totally false idea that the carjacker had a tattoo on his neck. After talking, there was a delay ranging from 5 minutes to 1 week. Then, participants were told to pick the suspect out of a line-up of pictures. The longer the delay, the more the misinformation affected them. In some sessions, the suspect wasn’t actually in the line-up of pictures. After the 5 minute delay, about 29% of people chose a photo of a vaguely similar person with a neck...