Perception as a reason to change our judicial process?

I read a book a few months back called Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior by Leonard Mlodinow, which gives countless examples to support the point that the way we construct our world is driven by unconscious or “subliminal” processes. Several chapters were devoted to perception and our unique ability to, as Kaplan explains, “experience the environment not as a series of snapshots of what is going on immediately in front of us, but…as a construction…made up of a good deal of prior knowledge and only samplings of current information” (Kaplan and Kaplan, 1982, p. 23).

One of the books examples was of a court case where a woman who was sexually assaulted wrongly convicted a man to jail. In the story, the woman studied the perpetrators face while being sexually assaulted and was able to give a very detailed recount of the events and description of the man. Although during the lineup the woman had a moment of uncertainty when looking at five men presented to her, she eventually settled on one of them (who was not the perpetrator but looked similar) and eventually sent him to jail. When the wrongly accused man asked for a retrial and the actual perpetrator was also presented to the woman in the second hearing, she still pointed to the wrongly accused man as the perpetrator. As the author explains, the wrongly convicted man’s face “was forever burned into her memory of that night” (Mlodinow, 2012, p. 54).

This seems like a perfect example of how our certainty in our correctness can deceive us, or put another way, the way we build internal representations does not mean precision and accuracy. Perception, as much as we want to consider it objective, is subjective because we are always dealing with incomplete information. Although our process of perception (repetition, recognition, and certainty) assists us in categorizing information so that we feel certain of the object, this does not mean it is accurate. As James explains “perception is of probable and definite things” (James cited in Kaplan and Kaplan, 1982, p. 31), probable meaning how we interpret it based on our repository of past experiences and understandings. In essence, our brain, not our eyes, see the world (Medina, 2008). Thus, the woman in the example by Mlodinow, drawing on her internal representation of the perpetrator, looked at a lineup of 5 very similar looking men and had to distinguish, with accuracy, the perpetrator.

This example leads me to wonder, why do we trust our visual capacity as accurate when science has proven our brains create perceived reality? And further, why does our judicial system, which I have other serious qualms with anyway, rely on a tactic that is so obviously incompatible with how our brain perceives? Mlodinow goes on to rattle off statistics that 20-25% of witnesses “make a choice that police officers know is incorrect” (emphasis in original text, p. 55) and Miller and Buckhout (1972) point to studies that show our limited ability to recognize objects that differ from one another in one or two aspects (p. 195), like, say a lineup of similarly built and featured perpetrators.

Without going on a tangent on the many ways we need to reform our penal system, our understanding of perception seems like more example that something needs to change.

Sources:

Kaplan S. and Kaplan J. (1982). Humanscape: Environments For People. Michigan: Ulrich's Books Inc. 

Medina, J. (2008). Brain rules: 12 principles for surviving and thriving at work, home, and school. Seattle, WA: Pear Press, Ch. 10, Vision. Excerpts pp. 223-231, 233-236. 

Miller, G. A., & Buckhout, R. (1973). Recognizing and Identifying. In Psychology: The Science of Mental Life (Second, pp. 188– 201). New York: Harper & Row.

Mlodinow, Leonard. (2012). Subliminal. How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior. New York: Random House.