The theory never stopped sounding ridiculous
The Republicans are saying it’s all a matter of mistaken identity.
The politically convenient, scientifically baseless theory that sexual assault so traumatized Christine Blasey Ford she mixed up her attacker is now something like common wisdom for many Republicans.
President Trump explicitly endorsed the theory Saturday, shortly after Brett M. Kavanaugh was narrowly confirmed as a Supreme Court judge, telling reporters he was “100 percent” sure Ford accused Kavanaugh in error.
Collins said it, Manchin said it, Graham said it.
[F]or many cognitive researchers who study how memories actually form during traumatic events, the theory never stopped sounding ridiculous.
“The person lying on top of you — who she’d previously met — you’re not going to forget that,” said Richard Huganir, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. “There’s a total consensus in the field of memory … If anything, fear and trauma enhances the encoding of the memory at a molecular level.”
As he and several other researchers told The Washington Post, being attacked floods the brain with chemicals, including norepinephrine, which helps people remember whatever they are focused on. (Ford, a psychologist herself, even mentioned it in her testimony.)
It’s essentially the same phenomenon that makes people forever remember what they were doing when planes hit the World Trade Center on 9/11, or when they learned John F. Kennedy was shot. It’s such a basic tenet of psychology and cognitive science that some researchers watched the mistaken-identity theory spread through the Senate this month with a sense of stunned dismay.
Because she already knew him. Misidentification of strangers is one thing, but he wasn’t a stranger to her.
Lila Davachi, a cognitive neuroscientist at Columbia University, analogized the traumatic memory formation process to cranking up the contrast on a photo — central details get heightened, while those in the background get washed out.
“If someone has a gun on you you’ll remember the gun. There’s a snapshot of critical features,” she said. “In this case it was a party with friends and she knew him. It is ridiculous to say she wouldn’t remember who it was.”
Ridiculous, but convenient.
I suppose that’s to allow them to accept the story of someone who was widely seen as credible and sympathetic, and yet – kindly – say she was wrong. They believe her story, and they have to find some way to make themselves feel better about their own assholery.
It’s OK, folks, your president has apologised to Kavanaugh on your behalf.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-45793524
He better not apologize on my behalf; I want no apology from me to Kavanaugh. Now I just have to say more mean things to make up for the apology.
Every pronouncement by Kav in future, whether officially from the SC bench or in casual conversation will be noted, scrutinised, analysed, deconstructed, reconstructed, etc, etc, etc: from San Diego up to Maine, and in every mine and mill, and by everyone except his loyal cheer squad. From your local barber shop to the Halls of Montezuma.
“Good morning America, how are you? / Sure you know me, I’m your native Kav…/ They say that I got rapey at a party / But I’ll be gone 500 miles come Judgement Day.” (With apologies to Arlo Guthrie.)
@2 AoS: I think you buried the lede. He didn’t just apologize to Kavanaugh. He said the confirmation process proved that he was innocent. Which… I mean…. No. It didn’t.
I am reminded of the film Mae West, based on the life of that very feisty lady. When hauled into a court by the police on a charge of indecency, Mae made some sarcastic remark, to which the judge responded: “Are you showing contempt for this court?”
“Why no Your Honour,” came the reply; “I was doing my best to conceal it.”
Time perhaps for a return season.
Steve Goodman.
There are a couple of publications which DID demonstrate that student’s memories (of the Challenger explosion and 9/11 specifically) were subject to drift and change between freshman and senior years. But I think Loftus also pointed out that NO instance of ‘suppressed memory’ could be found in traumatized kids.
The GOPpers and other scum are, of course, doing their usual bit of taking a piece of science that is normally anathema to their goals, twisting it around into an unrecognizable knot, then belching it out without any thought whatsoever because they think they can use it to justify their grade-A assholery.
In this case, it’s well-known that eyewitness memories are shaky things. They can be modified by natural drift, and also by suggestion; cognitive dissonance often turns ‘things I think might have happened’ into ‘things I know happened’. Cops routinely abuse the hell out of this to secure convictions, usually against poor minority suspects, by nudging the witness to be more and more certain of their originally very tentative identification of their assailant.
And of course, conservatives hate to even hint at acknowledging this problem, because there’s a very sizeable portion of our prison population that’s in there based solely on eyewitness accounts that have been carefully massaged into something more plausible. Admitting this would undermine their “Law & Order” stance that the justice system can do no wrong.
But a key part of this is that it’s talking about “Someone I don’t know”–a mugger on the street, a home intruder. It’s not a factor in cases where you’re being attacked by someone you already know, even if it’s just casually. That would require a virtual identical-twin situation. Your brain doesn’t lock on a couple of key details (eye, hair and skin color) that you can then apply to a large swath of the population, and thereby find a match for in a police line-up. It locks in on the idea that it’s THIS PERSON doing the attack. You’re going to remember that, not necessarily some odd detail like what they were wearing.
Freemage – I heard someone the other day going on about “repressed memories” driving Blasey-Ford’s testimony. I had a WTF moment, since she has not talked about repressed memories, but I guess they get to call it anything they want, because, well, they are men, they are Republicans, and they are assholes.
I agree the “someone else did it” theory is ridiculous.
However, and I want to be clear I’m not commenting on this case specifically, but I question the general implication that when something horrible happens a very accurate memory is seared into your mind.
Case in point: I have a friend who manages a fast-food restaurant. One day they were robbed. My friend was not there, but came in soon after she got the call telling her what had happened.
She spoke to the employee that had been on the register. This person told her a very detailed story: the robbers came up to her, pointed a gun at her, ordered her to give them all them money in the register, forced her to take them to the safe, pistol whipped her when they thought she was stalling, etc.
A couple of the other employees got uncomfortable and said they didn’t recall it happening like that and told a different story.
So my friend went and watched the security footage. The robbers came in and did threaten the cashier, who…froze. She completely froze. The robbers yelled a few things at her, then gave up and had someone else give them the money and take them to the safe. The cashier stood in the same place the whole time, apparently too terrified to move. After they left she started calming down and acting more normally, but aside from the initial encounter, her story about what had happened to her was completely wrong.
My friend said this employee is very reliable and very honest. She really thinks the cashier believed the story she told. My friend was actually rattled by the discrepancy between her employee’s memory and reality, as she had never encountered anything like that.
My friend told me this story just a few hours after it happened.
John the Drunkard, #8. There are also a lot of people who will recall with absolute certainty seeing live footage of the first ‘plane hit the tower despite the fact that only the second ‘plane’s collision was seen live on air; to show the first collision live would have required the tv stations to know in advance and have cameras ready at the scene.
To be honest, without checking I’m not entirely sure that there was any footage of the first collision at all, although I have a vague recollection of seeing what may have been footage from security / CCTV cameras, but that would have to have been much later.
There was footage of the first plane hitting but it of course was not shown live. Not security cameras (they tend not to point at the sky!): there was a French film crew shadowing a company of firefighters, and they were filming them checking out a gas leak in lower Manhattan when suddenly there was a roaring overhead and the camera person turned the camera upwards and followed the plane right into the tower. You can hear the firefighters saying “Holy shit. Holy shit.”
That’s the only known footage, I’m pretty sure.
https://youtu.be/h3shmfKOZ9g
Thank you, Ophelia. My memory of that was certainly foggy yet there are people who are certain that they saw it live on tv. It’s a completely different false memory to a person being attacked by one person and later mis-identifying the attacker as someone they knew quite well, which is what Dr. Ford’s critics are claiming happened. The former is consistent with what actually happened but confused on the chronology, the sort of thing that happens all the time, but the latter requires too great a leap of logic to be believable.
Kavanaugh got away with it; somebody should tell his supporters that they can stop trying to defend him now.
In fact, since his supporters seem to want women to be available for their use, and don’t like women much, perhaps they should admit he did it, crow about it, and just say “Neener neener”.
I know nobody’s in the mood to be charitable, but hopefully you don’t really believe people on the right think Kavanaugh did it and they think it’s great he got away with it.
Of course people on the right aren’t being particularly charitable either, for the most part choosing to believe the left was willing to do anything to torpedo a conservative replacement for Kennedy, and that was the motivation rather than a true concern for the charges.
Skeletor,
I absolutely think that a substantial subset of the right thinks exactly that. For two reasons:
First, throughout the entire drama, there was no shortage of people — and I mean supposedly “respectable” conservatives, not random Twitter eggs — who wanted to dismiss Kavanaugh’s alleged conduct as “roughhousing,” “boys will be boys,” “youthful indiscretion,” etc. Who among us, they asked, didn’t engage in such things as a teenager? Most of them were quick to insist that of course, they also didn’t believe it was true, but it was clear that the real defense was that they just didn’t care.
Second, as the OP points out, the “Dr. Ford was credible but she’s wrong about it being Kavanaugh” defense was never plausible. No halfway intelligent person in good faith could actually believe it. In fact, when Ed Whelan first floated the idea, he got laughed off of Twitter and resigned his position. But other than the fingering of a specific alternate suspect, basically the entire conservative movement and the Republican Senate caucus signed on to Whelan’s doppleganger theory. And while sometimes conservatives are able to take up factually baseless positions by the expedient of just not reading the details (global warming), here there’s really no dispute: this isn’t an issue that requires specialized knowledge or expertise, you can’t just point to some paid conservative hack experts and say well gosh, reasonable minds differ. This is the kind of thing that is within normal people’s ability to assess.
I am not saying that there is no way for a conservative to support Kavanaugh in good faith. One could argue that Kavanaugh probably did it but the evidence just isn’t sufficient — as I’ve argued extensively before, I don’t see why a “guilt beyond a reasonable doubt” standard is warranted here, but that is fundamentally a matter of opinion. I can even imagine saying “eh, just don’t find Dr. Ford credible, too many details she couldn’t recall, why didn’t she come forward sooner, etc.” — again, I think that’s ignoring the reality of memory and the behavior of sex crime victims, but these are conservatives we’re talking about, so I get why their mindset might differ. I even get why conservatives might find Kavanaugh credible, because once you’ve taken on a rooting interest it’s easy to rationalize things like his obvious lies about his drinking habits and yearbook entries.
But the standard conservative line of “oh yes, I believe that someone did something to that nice Dr. Ford, it just wasn’t our good boy Brett,” just reeks of bad faith. It’s a logically incoherent position that is only being employed because the Republicans have been warned that the “nutty and slutty” attack will backfire.
Skeletor, I second Screechy Monkey. It isn’t that they gave him the benefit of doubt because there really was no serious doubt, they simply didn’t care as long as they got their man onto the bench at SCOTUS.
I distinctly remember seeing the Challenger disaster on TV in my high school. But I was actually away in college at the time. I still believe that I saw the footage in high school.
I third Screechy Monkey. I live inside the Beltway, so I know Trump supporters who have steady professional career jobs with 6-figure salaries, so their Trump support is a Federalist thing, not a Rust Belt thing. Their support for Kavanaugh comes primarily from their top-down view of how the US government should work.
Screechy wrote “the real defense was that they just didn’t care,” and I take “I don’t care” to represent their disinterest in whether Kavanaugh did it or not.
This reminds me, when the ACLU supported Nazis marching in Skokie (1977), the ACLU was supporting speech rights in principle, not supporting Nazis or Nazism in particular. Similarly, the Senate votes for Kavanaugh were not votes for his innocence. The Federalists I know supported Kavanaugh on principles of how they see government should work. They care very much that they don’t want Kavanaugh-like hearings to be a new Congressional procedure like the filibuster, etc.