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much more likely to be accurate than one who appears much less sure, making it almost
impossible to determine whether a particular witness is accurate or not (Wells & Olson,
2003). [19]
I am sure that you have a clear memory of when you first heard about the 9/11 attacks in 2001,
and perhaps also when you heard that Princess Diana was killed in 1997 or when the verdict of
the O. J. Simpson trial was announced in 1995. This type of memory, which we experience along
with a great deal of emotion, is known as a flashbulb memory—a vivid and emotional memory of
an unusual event that people believe they remember very well. (Brown & Kulik, 1977). [20]
People are very certain of their memories of these important events, and frequently
overconfident. Talarico and Rubin (2003) [21] tested the accuracy of flashbulb memories by
asking students to write down their memory of how they had heard the news about either the
September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks or about an everyday event that had occurred to them
during the same time frame. These recordings were made on September 12, 2001. Then the
participants were asked again, either 1, 6, or 32 weeks later, to recall their memories. The
participants became less accurate in their recollections of both the emotional event and the
everyday events over time. But the participants’ confidence in the accuracy of their memory of
learning about the attacks did not decline over time. After 32 weeks the participants were
overconfident; they were much more certain about the accuracy of their flashbulb memories than
they should have been. Schmolck, Buffalo, and Squire (2000) [22] found similar distortions in
memories of news about the verdict in the O. J. Simpson trial.
Heuristic Processing: Availability and Representativeness
Another way that our information processing may be biased occurs when we use heuristics,
which are information-processing strategies that are useful in many cases but may lead to errors
when misapplied. Let’s consider two of the most frequently applied (and misapplied) heuristics:
the representativeness heuristic and the availability heuristic.
In many cases we base our judgments on information that seems to represent, or match, what we
expect will happen, while ignoring other potentially more relevant statistical information. When
we do so, we are using the representativeness heuristic. Consider, for instance, the puzzle