> The thing is, we have studies upon studies upon studies that show repeatedly and undoubtedly that witness testimony is shit.
Like so many things, I think the mistake here is to assume you can educate your way out of this. You could send every citizen through a six-week course on the problems with eye-witness testimony and some percentage of them will come out on the other side of that training insisting that, nah, if somebody says they saw the crime, then they saw it. We're talking about deep psychological biases carefully shaped by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution.
Like so many things, I think the mistake here is to assume you can educate your way out of this. You could send every citizen through a six-week course on the problems with eye-witness testimony and some percentage of them will come out on the other side of that training insisting that, nah, if somebody says they saw the crime, then they saw it. We're talking about deep psychological biases carefully shaped by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution.