Study: People Can be Convinced They Committed a Crime that Never Happened

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

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."
 
As with most of these things there is much more going on with this than what the limited beliefs of status-quo science holds as valid. But hey, people - even some posting on Skeptiko - continue to look to that same science to prove that there's something outside its canon.
 
Yeah, my first thought was about the well-known psychological phenomena where people, especially children, will go along with adults and/or authority figures because of an innate desire to please. This is why all questioning with police or court appointed psychologists must be video taped. It's also why they cannot hold children until they get the answer from them that the psychologist wants. I understand these were college aged subjects, but the phenomenon has been proven with adults too.
 
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