Innocent adults can be convinced, over the course of a few hours, that they perpetrated serious crimes according to the new study lead by Dr Julia Shaw.

The lab-based evidence, from wrongful-conviction cases, showed more than 70% of participants adopted stories they were told – providing rich and detailed descriptions of events that never actually took place.

Crimes were as serious as an assault with a weapon in their teenage years.

“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, the findings show,” Dr Shaw explained. 

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

The research was co-authored alongside Stephen Porter of the University of British Columbia in Canada and conducted on 60 university students.

In the first interview, the researcher told the student about two events he or she had experienced (either a crime or an emotional occurrence, such as being assaulted) as a teen, only one of which actually happened.

The false event stories included some true details about that time in the student’s life.

Participants were asked to explain what happened. When they had difficulty explaining the false event, the interviewer encouraged them to try anyway, saying if they used specific memory strategies they might be able to recall more details.

In the second and third interviews, the students had to recall as much as possible about both the true and false event. They were asked to described certain features of each memory, such as how vivid it was and how confident they were about it.

The results were astonishing:

• Out of the 30 participants who were told they had committed a crime as a teenager, 21 (71%) had developed a false memory of the crime.
• Of the 20 who were told about an assault of some kind (with or without a weapon), 11 reported elaborate false memory details of their exact dealings with the police.
• Just over 76% formed false memories of the emotional event they were told about.

The students tended to provide the same number of details, and reported similar levels of confidence, vividness, and sensory detail for the two types of false events.

Dr Shaw and Porter speculate that incorporating true details, such as names, into an account endowed the false event with enough familiarity to make it plausible.

“This research speaks to the distinct possibility that most of us are likely able to generate rich false memories of emotional and criminal events,” Dr Shaw, whose specialisms focus on false memories, eyewitness issues, and criminal thinking, said.

 “Understanding that these complex false memories exist, and that ‘normal’ individuals can be led to generate them quite easily, is the first step in preventing them from happening.

“By demonstrating the harm ‘bad’ interview techniques – those which are known to cause false memories – can cause, we can more readily convince interviewers to avoid them and to use ‘good’ techniques instead.”

Notes to editor

• The researchers were supported by the University of British Columbia through the Lashley and Mary Haggman Memory Research Award and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
• The study has been published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
• For more details visit: www.psychologicalscience.org
• To arrange an interview with Dr Shaw, contact Ulrika Meegolla on 01582 489399.