Suppose you witnessed a heinous crime being committed right before your eyes. Suppose further that a few hours later, you’re being interrogated by hard-nosed detectives Olivia Benson and Odafin Tutuola. They ask you to describe the perpetrator. The next day, they call you in to the police station and present you with a lineup. Suppose the suspect is in the lineup. Will you be able to pick him out? A classic study in psychology suggest Benson and Tutuola have made a mistake by first having you describe the perpetrator because the very act of describing the perpetrator will make it more difficult for you to identify him out of the lineup. This finding is known as the verbal overshadowing effect and was discovered by Jonathan Schooler. In the experiment that is of interest here, he and his co-author, Tonya Engstler-Schooler, found that verbally describing the perpetrator led to a 25% accuracy decrease in identifying him. This is a sizeable difference with practical implications. B...