Lives Destroyed by Distorted Recollections of Fluency, Attention, View, and Confidence: A Sin of Bias in Eyewitness Identification

Bias is the name that Daniel Schacter gave to one of the “seven sins of memory,” in which current knowledge or beliefs distort recollections of the past (Schacter, 2001, 2021). Although the sin of bias was heavily featured in both the first and later edition of Schacter’s book, it was not among the five sins that Schacter discussed in his target article on the implications of sins of memory for applied domains such as education, medicine, and the law. We suggest, however, that the sin of bias is among the most consequential memory sins for the legal system. We discuss a wellestablished sin of bias in eyewitness identification that, we argue, likely accounts for more wrongful convictions than any other single memory phenomenon.We