I don’t understand how police sketch artists are so accurate from a person’s description. To be honest, I feel like I couldn’t adequately describe my best friend’s physical appearance well enough for a sketch artist to draw it.
In: 0
Here is a thing about drawing faces. Reality is that only very few parts actaully matter, and there is only a specific amount of general variation between them. I used to have a book with the most common variations and names for them. You only need specific features to make people see the connection. Generally these are:
* General face type (round, square, heavy, chubby)
* Nose size and general type (long, “greek”, small, wide)
* Eye shape (Almond, monolid…)
These are enough for humans regocnise a face. I’m sure that you have experienced this yourself. You have regocnised your friend in a crowd further away, than you would be able to see the features of their face. And I’m sure you have also seen someone who you are sure was your father or smth, but isn’t them. Even if they look almost exactly like your father.
However… Sketches are only good if you are describing someone you actually properly know what they look like. Eyewitness testimonies for random people in quick stressful events are basically unreliable. To make them reliable, you actually need to be very specific how you ask the questions. There is a whole science to this, and generally cops don’t have the training needed for this – so consultants who know the psychology behind memory are needed to guide the situation or do the questioning. Because human memory is tricky, it wants to be sure about things, if it isn’t sure and you happen to give the slightest inspiration to come up with something to make the memory coherent, it will do that and overwrite whatever there was before. This has been tested, and it is quite alarming. It was like near 50% of people, could be convinced that they have commited a crime, they have never ever done, by asking them to remember such thing and then filling in the gaps.
Here is a thing about drawing faces. Reality is that only very few parts actaully matter, and there is only a specific amount of general variation between them. I used to have a book with the most common variations and names for them. You only need specific features to make people see the connection. Generally these are:
* General face type (round, square, heavy, chubby)
* Nose size and general type (long, “greek”, small, wide)
* Eye shape (Almond, monolid…)
These are enough for humans regocnise a face. I’m sure that you have experienced this yourself. You have regocnised your friend in a crowd further away, than you would be able to see the features of their face. And I’m sure you have also seen someone who you are sure was your father or smth, but isn’t them. Even if they look almost exactly like your father.
However… Sketches are only good if you are describing someone you actually properly know what they look like. Eyewitness testimonies for random people in quick stressful events are basically unreliable. To make them reliable, you actually need to be very specific how you ask the questions. There is a whole science to this, and generally cops don’t have the training needed for this – so consultants who know the psychology behind memory are needed to guide the situation or do the questioning. Because human memory is tricky, it wants to be sure about things, if it isn’t sure and you happen to give the slightest inspiration to come up with something to make the memory coherent, it will do that and overwrite whatever there was before. This has been tested, and it is quite alarming. It was like near 50% of people, could be convinced that they have commited a crime, they have never ever done, by asking them to remember such thing and then filling in the gaps.
Latest Answers