the.com/witness testimony
a confident story your brain swears is a memory, even when it isn't.
means a firsthand account of events given as evidence, treated as fact despite being reconstructed, not recorded.
from from old english witnessa, one who knows by having seen; courts built entire justice systems on the assumption that seeing is remembering, before psychology proved otherwise.
exoneration dataover 69 percent of overturned convictions involved mistaken eyewitnesses
confidence vs accuracythe two barely correlate, despite juries trusting confidence most
memory decaydetails warp within minutes, not years, of the event
leading questionscan implant false memories that feel completely real