Dissociation: Imagination and Error in Criminal Justice
The role of dissociation in what we see and remember.
Posted April 6, 2026 | Reviewed by Ekua Hagan
The process of dissociation is often considered only in terms of its most severe clinical manifestation, dissociative identity disorder (DID). However, dissociation is actually a completely normal process, present in everyone, but typically at far lower intensities than those of DID.
Normal dissociation enables us to disengage our psychological processes from the ongoing tangible reality around us. This is useful; dissociation can provide us with temporary relief from tragedy, or even from everyday drudgery. Dissociation can also support our imagination , as we allow our minds to create new concepts in art, literature, or the sciences, creating concepts which do not yet exist in physical reality (e.g., Sharps & Price-Sharps, 2026).
Yet normal dissociation has a dark side, as well. In great affairs and in everyday life, dissociation can cause us to believe in things that actually don’t exist. In my laboratory, we have shown that normal dissociation contributes significantly to unsubstantiated paranormal beliefs, and even to the perceptual reconfiguration of everyday things into paranormal objects and entities, ranging from alien spacecraft to Bigfoot (Sharps & Price-Sharps, 2026).
The influence of dissociation extends even into the sciences. Astronomers, for example, have sometimes interpreted natural physical features of other planets as evidence of extraterrestrial life, or even as the work of extraterrestrials (e.g., Sheehan, 1988); and our experiments have shown that more dissociated individuals tend to make exactly the same types of incorrect interpretations of astronomical images. We have even found that dissociation may influence beliefs in climate change , which in turn may result in the misinterpretation of environmental images (see Sharps & Price-Sharps, 2026, for review). Since we all rely on science for our essential understanding of reality, it is a disquieting fact, worthy of much additional research, that dissociation can alter our scientific interpretations, and even our perceptions of scientific realities.
Some of the most disquieting effects of dissociation, however, may be found in the criminal justice system.
Eyewitness memory , for example, may be strongly influenced by imaginative processes which allow us to dissociate our memories from the veridical reality they putatively represent. Our personal beliefs, and even the language in which questions about eyewitness situations are expressed, can contribute to this effect. In our experiments on this subject, we found that the second most common types of errors made by witnesses to an experimental crime scene, second only to errors of perpetrator appearance, were errors of the imagination . Even under laboratory conditions, with good lighting and ideal viewing conditions, eyewitnesses simply made things up , creating “memories” based on nothing at all, with no idea they were doing it.
Even repeated renditions of a given eyewitness memory can produce this effect. As we repeat our accounts of a given crime or crime scene, errors of memory may accumulate, seamlessly becoming part of later retellings with no awareness on the part of the given eyewitness. Ultimately, we may remember such accumulative errors as if they were genuine elements of the eyewitness memory we’re reporting (Sharps & Price-Sharps, 2026).
Thought and Decision-Making
The effects of dissociation operate in the realms of thought and decision-making , as well as in memory, in the world of criminal justice. In several studies of the juridical judgment of officer-involved shootings (OISs), for example, we found that respondent rationales for their judgments of the guilt or innocence of individual officers were frequently based on preconceived notions or emotional concepts that were completely unrelated to the facts of the given case. There was sufficient dissociation from the grim facts of the given OIS that many respondents never noticed that their conclusions were based on their own internal cognitive and affective perspectives, rather than on the objective realities of the OIS situations themselves.
Perhaps the most egregious example of dissociation in criminal justice lies in the frequently tragic realm of blaming the victim . We conducted experiments in which respondents, in the role of jurors, had to assign guilt or innocence in crime scenarios that involved theft in the presence of systematically varied levels of violence. The dissociative tendencies of the respondents were directly measured using a standard instrument, the Dissociative Experiences Scale-II.
Interestingly, scenario violence had no significant effect on the perception of perpetrator guilt or innocence. However, violence significantly influenced the attribution of guilt to the victim. If the victim was assaulted or murdered during the theft, the victim's responsibility was rated lower than if the victim had only suffered the theft. However, no difference was seen with reference to those victims either assaulted or murdered; it was the mere presence of violence, rather than the level of violence, that was important.
Dissociation also influenced the perception of victim guilt, of victims’ responsibility for their own victimization. Dissociative tendencies did not predict greater levels of guilt attribution to the victim if simply robbed or even assaulted. However, dissociation was significantly associated with greater attribution of guilt to the victim if the victim was murdered! In other words, people who exhibited higher levels of dissociation saw victims as relatively responsible for their own murders . This effect might seem incredible, but it makes more sense considering the related finding that more dissociated respondents also tended to see perpetrators as less guilty of the crimes they committed, without regard to the level of violence involved in those crimes at all (Sharps & Price-Sharps, 2026).
Expanding the Study of Dissociation
Normal dissociative processes operate far beyond the important and severe clinical realm of DID. We find dissociation, at a normal level, operating in virtually all walks of life, ranging from the prosaic and everyday to perceptions and interpretations in the sciences, and, perhaps most disturbingly, to our perceptions and interpretations in the criminal justice system. These effects extend even to “blaming the victim,” to judgments of guilt on the part of the victims of crimes. It is hoped that these new lines of research (e.g., Sharps & Price-Sharps, 2026) will spur more studies of the important influence of dissociation in the realm of criminal justice and beyond.
Sharps, M.J., & Price-Sharps, J.L. 2026. Dissociation and Belief: The Psychology of Why Things Go Horribly Wrong and What To Do About It. Amazon.
Sheehan, W. (1988). Planets and Perception: Telescopic Views and Interpretations, 1909-1909. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press.
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Matthew Sharps, Ph.D., professor of psychology at California State University, Fresno. He researches forensic cognitive science among other related areas.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.