Memory’s frailty may play role in Kavanaugh case, experts say

NEW YORK — She says he sexually assaulted her; he denies it. Is somebody deliberately lying?

Not necessarily.

Experts say that because of how memory works, it’s possible that both Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford — the woman who says a drunken Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed and groped her at a party when they were teenagers in the early 1980s — believe what they say.

And which one of them believes his or her version more strongly is no tip-off to what really happened.

“Confidence is not a good guide to whether or not someone is telling the truth,” said Nora Newcombe, a psychology professor at Temple University in Philadelphia.

As the nation ponders the accusations from Ford that could derail Kavanaugh’s nomination, the possibility that one of them simply got it wrong has been floated on Capitol Hill. Ford’s lawyers have said some senators appear to have made up their mind that she is “mistaken” and confused.

Experts say a person’s memory is not like a video recorder, perfectly capturing an objective record of everything that happens for later retrieval.

“Memory is mostly true but sometimes unreliable,” said psychologist Jennifer Talarico of Lafayette College in Easton, Pa.

Generally, “we get the gist mostly right.”

Typically, when people make mistakes in recalling an event, they unknowingly slip in details that would be typical on such occasions, Talarico said.

When it comes to emotionally charged events, it’s typical to remember a central person or an item such as a gun but forget the context and details, Newcombe said. “You have this vivid central thing and everything else is fuzzy,” she said. “Emotion makes one thing go up and the other go down.”

Ford, a 51-year-old psychology professor, told The Washington Post that she told nobody about the alleged incident in any detail until 2012.