Page 123 - Toyota Under Fire

TOYOT A UNDER FIRE

It is well known in cognitive psychology that people “back-
fill” their recollections. That is, they fill in details to make a story
logical and complete, often without realizing that they are doing
so. This has been shown to have a big impact on eyewitness testi-
mony, as information learned subsequent to the event gets incor-
porated into a witness’s memory, leading the individual to believe
it as if it were the actual memory. One of the leading experts on
this process, Elizabeth Loftus, explains the development of false
certainty by claiming that “the more people think about an event
from the past, the more confident they become in their memo-
ries. The problem is that they get more confident in their inaccu-
rate memories as well as their accurate ones.”*
The severity of the effect is best illustrated graphically (see
Figure 3.2). The chart is based on the cleaned version of the
NHTSA database generated by Edmunds.com. Before the Saylor
accident, while monthly complaints about Toyota were higher
than those for other manufacturers, they were not dramatically
so—usually below 20. Then, as the media speculation kicked
into high gear, the number of complaints experienced a sudden
acceleration, reaching a high point of more than 1,300 com-
plaints in February 2010, after several recalls were announced.
By September 2010, the number was back down to below 20.
(Note that Toyota did not make any changes in its vehicle elec-
tronics during that time.)
So while unfounded speculation ran rampant, resulting in no
small part from the general public’s confusion about how vehi-
cles work, Toyota engineers and executives in Japan believed that
any technical or design issues had been resolved via the floor mat

* Elizabeth Loftus, Eyewitness Testimony (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1996).

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