In the Blindspot reading, the “Mindbugs” chapter was so interesting as I had never heard of this concept before. Mindbugs, or “ingrained habits of thought that lead to errors in how we perceive, remember, reason, and make decisions” certainly pertains to this course (4). In becoming effective consumers of information, we need to be wary of these mindbugs. In understanding these errors, Hermann von Helmholtz describes the “unconscious inference” by which our visual system is tricked (6). I did not even think of this in how we process words– as for my classes pretty much all I do is read books and empirical articles! Now I wonder if I have ever fallen victim to mindbugs when processing information. Mindbugs also have the power to “produce greater recollection of things that didn’t occur than of things that did occur” and I have definitely been susceptible to this on exams that required me to pull from my short-term memory, such as a vocabulary quiz, where I tried to pull more information than was actually needed (9). While a quiz is not a big deal, the author mentions that mindbugs can come into play in criminal cases; I am taking a child development class right now and we discuss child eyewitness testimony was at times, children false report things they did not see. This can have extreme behavioral impacts on the witness’s reporting and can even lead to punishments to occur (like the death penalty) for someone who may have been falsely convicted…
Anna Marston
I have learned about false convictions in psych classes that I have taken before as well. However, we never learned about mindbugs as a possible explanation for how eye witness testimonies can be skewed. It raises an interesting question as to whether or not eyewitness testimonies are to be trusted in court. Are cases better of without them, seeing as they are unreliable as a result of mindbugs? Or, is it prudent to use as much evidence as possible?
I also wondered if I have ever fallen victim to mindbugs after reading this article. I’ve never been an eyewitness in a criminal case before, but it makes me question if I process things accurately and how differently another person may see the world because of the way their minds process things.
This reading made me most worried of not being able to trust my memory in the future. I am extremely more aware of not being able to trust myself. It reminded me of a documentary I watched about people confessing to crimes that they had not committed. After reading this, I am pretty sure that I would confess to any crime that I am accused of, no matter if I committed it or not.
I know I have definitely fallen victim to mind bugs in the past, but I also wondered if mindbugs and false memories are also influenced by our dreams. There have been so many mornings where I wake up and think that my dream was real, but quickly realize it was not. This reading made me wonder if there were ever times where my dream was so plausible that I never realized that it was a dream.