Arouet
Member
Haven't read the original paper, but really interesting study about inducing false memories.
Article: http://www.disabled-world.com/news/pressreleases/convinced.php
Abstract: http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/01/14/0956797614562862.abstract
Article: http://www.disabled-world.com/news/pressreleases/convinced.php
Abstract: http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/01/14/0956797614562862.abstract
Evidence from some wrongful-conviction cases suggests that suspects can be questioned in ways that lead them to falsely believe in and confess to committing crimes they didn't actually commit. New research provides lab-based evidence for this phenomenon, showing that innocent adult participants can be convinced, over the course of a few hours, that they had perpetrated crimes as serious as assault with a weapon in their teenage years.
Intriguingly, the criminal false events seemed to be just as believable as the emotional ones. Students tended to provide the same number of details, and reported similar levels of confidence, vividness, and sensory detail for the two types of event.
Shaw and Porter speculate that incorporating true details, such as the name of an actual friend, into an account that was supposedly corroborated by the student's caregiver likely endowed the false event with just enough familiarity that it came to seem plausible.
"In such circumstances, inherently fallible and reconstructive memory processes can quite readily generate false recollections with astonishing realism," says Shaw. "In these sessions we had some participants recalling incredibly vivid details and re-enacting crimes they never committed."