Quote:
Originally Posted by aran
There are some inconsistent stories, and some people who were somehow involved tell inconsistent stories when asked at different times. This does not indicate that a hoax happened. We already know well how unreliable witness testimony is. Memories are constructed, and when you retell a story you tend to fill in blanks that you don't remember so it all joins together into something coherent. Telling a story multiple times mutates it through a one-man telephone effect. Inconsistencies so derived do not at all indicate there was a hoax, just that there are some confused witnesses.
The media also tends to report before they can confirm and corroborate, which gives the impression that they're "changing the story" when actually they didn't know the story to begin with.
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Exactly. There was a great show that I saw about how the mind works and one of the things they did was stage something to show how bad the memory can really be and how people's stories changed from one moment to the next. Like a woman who retold the story as "a man did..." but then an hour later when telling someone else sayid "a woman did..." That wasn't even under the stress of a mass murder.