2015/01/16

Psychological Science January 15, 2015:  People Can Be Convinced They Committed a Crime That Never Happened

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.

The research, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, indicates that the participants came to internalize the stories they were told, providing rich and detailed descriptions of events that never actually took place.

“Our findings show that false memories of committing crime with police contact can be surprisingly easy to generate, and can have all the same kinds of complex details as real memories,” says psychological scientist and lead researcher Julia Shaw of the University of Bedfordshire in the UK.

“All participants need to generate a richly detailed false memory is 3 hours in a friendly interview environment, where the interviewer introduces a few wrong details and uses poor memory-retrieval techniques.”

Shaw and co-author Stephen Porter of the University of British Columbia in Canada obtained permission to contact the primary caregivers of university students participating in the study. The caregivers were asked to fill out a questionnaire about specific events the students might have experienced from ages 11 to 14, providing as much detail as possible. The caregivers were instructed not to discuss the questions with the student. more