If a violent and serious crime occurred right in front of your very eyes, do you think you would see it? Do you think you would have seen the assault in the image below? I suspect your answer would be “duh, of course!”.
What about if you were focusing your attention on something else? On your phone, perhaps? Doing some chores? Watching your child?
We often believe that what we see when we open our eyes is a complete picture of all that is out there in the world. But unfortunately, purely looking does not mean that we see everything. In fact, evidence suggests that when we are focusing our attention on something else, it is quite possible that we might not notice something incredibly obvious and serious happening right in front of us, even something like a violent crime.
This experience is called “inattentional blindness”. If you are not yet familiar with the term, see if this video jogs your memory
Our legal system relies quite heavily on the information that witnesses to crimes provide. This might be the only form of evidence available to tie an offender to the event. So if potential witnesses are not expecting a crime to happen, and are focused on something else at the time, could they fail to notice that crime? And what impact does failing to notice a crime happening have on the type of information witnesses provide?
These two questions were the focus of the PhD research of Hayley Cullen, UON Psychology’s new member of staff with expertise in Forensic Psychology.
Hayley explains: “In some fun experiments, we had naïve participants watch a video, such as that above, where they were given a specific counting task to complete (“How many times did the football teams drop the ball?). Unbeknownst to our participants, about midday through the video, an individual walked right through the middle of the ball game with a weapon, towards a bystander on the side, and assaulted this bystander.
Well, close to three quarters of all of our participants did not see this violent assault at all. Interestingly, we also found that while the amount of detail these witnesses provided was reduced compared to witnesses who saw the crime, these witnesses were still able to provide some accurate details that would be important for the criminal investigation (such as a description of the bystanders)”.
So, it seemed as if failing to notice a crime affected the quantity of information witnesses provided, but not necessarily the quality. However, in a similar study using a different video, we found that failing to notice the crime did actually reduce the accuracy (and therefore quality) of witnesses’ memories. Hayley also found that after providing these participants with misleading, incorrect information about the crime, witnesses who did not see the crime were more likely to report these incorrect details in their memory accounts.
What does this all mean? For one, these findings tell us that despite what we might initially believe, serious crimes can go unnoticed by bystanders when their attention is focused on something else. And failing to notice crimes when they occur can have some pretty serious consequences for the quality of the witness’ testimony. Police officers who are given the task of interviewing these witnesses should bear this in mind when taking statements, so that they do not put pressure on these witnesses to provide inaccurate information about events they have not seen.
Hayley will be contributing with her research and her teaching to the newly established Bachelor of Criminology/Bachelor of Psychological Science at UON.
To know more about Hayley Cullen’s research on forensic psychology: Hayley.Cullen@newcastle.edu.au
