Interesting article with some considerations for this case, if you care to read through...
Politicians may not even know they’re lying
Daniel FinkelsteinMay 7 2019, 5:00pm,
When Gavin Williamson swears he isn’t a leaker, it could be that he has really convinced himself he’s telling the truth
One day, on their way back from dinner in Washington DC, Leslie Meltzer and her husband Tyce Palmaffy saw something dreadful. They were stopped at some traffic lights watching a man slowly cycle towards them, when suddenly another man came out of nowhere and knocked the cyclist over. And then he began stabbing the cyclist as he lay on the ground.
I thought of this story when, last week, it was reported that the former defence secretary Gavin Williamson had sworn on his children’s lives that he was innocent of leaking the proceedings of the National Security Council. It seemed such an odd thing to say. What could possibly explain such vehemence?
Well, the first possibility is that Mr Williamson is just a rogue. He knows full well he did it but is willing to lie about it, even involving his children in his ghastly deceit. People do lie. Look at Jeffrey Archer. Or Jonathan Aitken. And Harvey Weinstein was quite fond of swearing on his children’s lives.
Another possibility, of course, is that Mr Williamson is, as he claims, not guilty at all. His oath may be crass, but you get pretty desperate when accused of something you didn’t do. It’s possible, isn’t it? People have been hanged in the past for crimes they didn’t commit. It has to be said that everyone I’ve talked to who is in the know seems completely confident that in Williamson they’ve got their man, but then again they would be, wouldn’t they?
There is, however, a third possibility. One that will sound almost ridiculous but is actually very plausible. Mr Williamson did it, but he can’t remember that he did it. He thinks he’s innocent. He is sure he didn’t do it. He’d swear on his kids’ lives. But all along, it was actually him.
Let’s go back to Palmaffy and Meltzer. In their book The Invisible Gorilla Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons tell their story, recording how over the folowing six years the two began to remember the event in very different ways. Meltzer, for instance, remembers calling the US emergency number, 911, from the passenger seat while Palmaffy was driving. Palmaffy says he called 911 and Melzer was driving.
Still, by the time of this confusion years had gone by, so perhaps the differing recall is not that surprising and not at all like the Williamson case. What is more startling is that this divergence began during the 911 call. The moment after the stabbing. One of them thought the assailant was wearing jeans, the other sweatpants. They disagreed about how tall he was, the shirt he was wearing, even whether he might have been an African American or Hispanic.
In other words, we start creating false memories of things almost as soon as they happen. Palmaffy and Meltzer are typical. There is really a vast literature on this. As Julia Shaw says in her recent book The Memory Illusion, “Any event, no matter how important, emotional or traumatic it may seem, can be forgotten, misremembered, or even be entirely fictitious”.
More than that, we have little understanding that we do this. We are immensely confident in our own memory. We’d swear we were right on our kids’ lives.
A fascinating example of this confidence is provided by an ingenious study into memories of 9/11. Thinking quickly after the terrible terrorist attack, two psychologists (Jennifer Talarico and David Rubin) thought to gather a group of students the very next day and ask them what they were up to when they heard the news. They also asked them for another, less momentous, personal memory from the same week.
Over the coming days and months the psychologists returned to check the memories of their subjects. And as time passed the recollections changed, often quite radically. This was true of both 9/11 and of the personal events, and to the same degree. Yet while the subjects were willing to accept that they had forgotten the exact circumstances of the less important event, they were certain they were still right about 9/11. Even though they weren’t.
What that means is that you don’t remember exactly where you were when you heard that John F Kennedy was shot or what you were doing at the precise instance that you heard about 9/11. You just think you do.
The extent of our confidence in recollection was brought home to me recently when the shadow lord chancellor Richard Burgon got himself in trouble. He’d been accused of saying in a speech in 2016 that “Zionism is the enemy of peace”. He went on television to deny repeatedly that he had ever said such a thing. He couldn’t have done, he said, because he had no recall of it, there was no evidence of it and he didn’t think it. So he hadn’t said it. And then a video showed up. He had said it.
The lie appeared blatant. He tried denying it because he thought he’d get away with it and got caught. I got absolutely nowhere trying to explain to people that it was entirely plausible that Mr Burgon had forgotten what he said and was now amazed that he even thought it. It is particularly likely to happen when the new memory, vivid and strong, is more convenient or comfortable than the old one. When I talked about this to one of my colleagues he told me that if he ever wanted to commit fraud he would pick me as the target.
The memory issue arises again and again in politics. Hillary Clinton, for instance, has long been excoriated for her claim that she landed in Bosnia and had to run for cover to avoid sniper fire. Pictures emerged of her being greeted by smiling officials and an eight-year-old girl reading a poem.
Yet the guru of studies of false memories, Elizabeth Loftus, has shown beyond doubt that it is possible to remember very clearly things that did not happen. So, for example, she prompted subjects to recall seeing Bugs Bunny at Disneyland, when he is a Warner Brothers character. Or to remember, in some detail, being lost in a shopping mall when no such thing had happened.
We routinely conduct political discourse and even court cases on the basis that we witness things and remember them in an objective way, as if we were video cameras. But we are not.
For Gavin Williamson to admit to himself that he was responsible for the leak — he helped the journalist on his way, he confirmed what had been a hunch, he initiated the whole thing, whatever — would be psychologically very hard. Much easier to forget you did it. To really, really believe that you didn’t. But it’s not a good idea to swear your innocence on your children’s lives unless you aren’t fond of them.
