On 21/10/2011 01:56 PM, Warp wrote:

>    Another less known fact (which I already mentioned in my earlier post)
> is that it's surprisingly common for people to have witnessed something
> personally when in fact they didn't, and instead they were just told about
> it.

I read about an experiment which culminated in the researchers asking a 
group of people if they'd seen the Bugs Bunnie poster last time they 
were at Disney World. (They didn't just ask; they did things like show 
people a poster next to a Mickey Mouse poster and so on and so forth.) A 
significant number of people claimed they *had* in fact seen this poster.

(Those of you paying attention will notice that Bugs Bunnie is *not* a 
Disney character, and wouldn't be seen dead at Disney World...)

>    Another problem is that, as I said, people do not repeat the words they
> hear. They repeat the mental image they got from those words.

There's a famous demonstration which involves telling a person that 
you're going to read them a description and then quiz them on it, so 
they need to remember as many details as possible. You give them a long 
drawn-out description of a house by a road, with a garden and a car and 
so on and so forth. At the end, you ask what colour the car was. 
Everybody is sure they heard you say a colour, but in fact the story 
does not specify the car's actual colour. False recall, right there. 
Pretty easy to demonstrate [provided you can find somebody who doesn't 
already know it's a trick].

>    Eyewitness testimony is just worthless. Ufologists and ufo believers
> should stop putting so much weight on them.

And courtrooms.

Oh, wait...

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