24 September Today's term from psychology is the Verbatim Effect.

24 September

Today's term from psychology is the Verbatim Effect.

Verbatim Effect is, simply put that the gist of what someone has said is usually remembered, not what they said word for word, or verbatim. This is because we are not electronic recording devices. Our memories are representations, NOT exact copies.

People tend to categorize information based on meaning, rather than how that meaning is presented. We might say something three different times, each time using different words. To us, we said the same thing three times because to us the meaning was the same each time. To a listener, however, who is not familiar with whatever we are talking about, what we said might be interpreted as three completely different and unrelated things.

There is an expectation in the law that people will always describe an event in exactly the same words each time they recount that event. Thus any deviation from that single description must be an indication that a witness or suspect's story is changing. In the real world, this is exactly backwards. If a witness or suspect described an event in exactly the same words twice, it had to have been memorized. From a script.