I found the Mindbug reading very interesting, especially on page 9-10, where the authors discussed retroactive inference and the misinformation effect. I read a famous book called “Picking Cotton” which is about a man who was wrongfully convicted for rape, yet the woman who was raped identified the man in a line up and was certain it was that man who had raped her. It turns out that the police was swaying her (using specific language and gestures) to get her to convict Ronald Cotton, even though he was not the man who raped her. This is a direct example of the misinformation effect; the police were using selective language to try and compel a witness testimony, which ultimately led to Jennifer “relying on mistaken information” (10) as the truth.

Furthermore, the reading goes on to say how detrimental and dangerous this can be for our criminal justice system because the misinformation effect has led to many cases of wrongful conviction. In Ronald’s case, he spent over ten years in prison for a crime he did not commit. I found this section of the reading the most interesting because this book is one of my favorite books and I immediately saw this as a real life example of the misinformation effect. I wonder, how could we try and reduce this problem in the criminal justice system? This seems like a major problem, since not only are these people sent to jail for a crime they did not commit, but then they have to face the challenges when they get out (no voting rights, hard time getting a steady job/home, poverty…) when they did nothing wrong in the first place.

Additionally, one question that I have for the authors is what they would think about the idea of evolutionary mismatch. Evolutionary mismatch is the idea that we still have traits and we still view certain things as advantageous, because they once were advantageous for small scale societies throughout history, when they are not that beneficial/important in a large scale society. For example, why are we scared of spiders (when they pose no harm) and not cars (where your chance of dying is immensely higher than dying from a spider)? On page 19, the authors state that our social world would be unrecognizable to our ancestors. I very much do agree with this statement and what they had to say about it. However, I wonder what the authors would have to say about evolutionary mismatch and how this applies to mindbugs.