This brings an important point to remember when looking at the technique: it is based on how well someone remembers an event, which is very different from determining if something happened. Actual events can have poor memories — and they often do — fake events can be given with the utmost or least amount of clarity. Furthermore, this technique makes it very difficult to tell if someone is lying or just forgetting. For me, these are tremendous weaknesses of this technique, though I will discuss others later.
According to the theory behind the technique, people fill in gaps in the information they don’t actually remember (but they feel is “true” to the story). Therefore, it is hypothesized that people telling the truth will be lucid in their descriptions, but liars will not. There’s no standard implementation of the technique, but Vrij discusses eight criteria (from Sporer): clarity, perceptual information, spatial information, temporal information, affect, reconstructability of the story, realism, and cognitive operations. According to theory, the first seven criteria should occur more often in truthful statements while the last should occur more often in false statements.
I read a story about my brother’s experiences playing football. I believe the story was truthful. He used perceptual information about how he felt physically and what he saw many times. There was plenty of contextual information throughout the story, as it was a game and therefore easy to remember specific events and what lead up to them. There were a few affective details, but not many due to the nature of the story. Furthermore, he used almost no cognitive operations - which may be more of an indictment of football than anything else (haha).
Overall, despite the positives of this approach — in that it is good at detecting accuracy of memories, and therefore possibly lies — it has some more fatal weaknesses (other than those above). For one, Realty Monitoring is not good for analyzing children’s statements, since they seem to be unable to differentiate between real and false memories as easily. Time-wise, more distant memories were not as accurate and more recent ones. Immediate responses to questions yielded more accurate detection results because there was less of a chance to visualize false memories. Finally, the eight basic criteria used to determine lies and the three fundamental ideas of the approach seemed to overlap somewhat (within their given realms, I don’t mean with one another), and it felt like splitting hairs at times trying to apply them and understand the reasoning behind the differences.
The approach is similar to CBCA, though data is not reliable enough to confirm this due to confounding factors. But, I agree with the reading that because it’s based on more logical assumptions and findings, and is theoretical, it is therefore probably more useful than CBCA.
posted by Josh P @ 11:22 AM
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