Handbook of Psychology of Investigative Interviewing: Current Developments and Future Directions
Page 38
opment of false reports of childhood events is an important avenue for future
research (Ost et al. 2001; 2005 ).
A fi nal limitation of the parental misinformation studies is that they rely on
parents or siblings to verify that certain events did, or did not, occur to par-
ticipants when they were children. This may be unwise. Whilst it is probable
that parents will be able to remember events in the lives of their young children
with more confi dence than the children themselves (see Ost et al. , 2005 ), this
in itself is no guarantee that they will remember them with great accuracy
(Conte, 1999 ). Indeed, in Ost et al. (2005) , a few participants stated outright
that their parents must have misremembered events or confused the participant
with another sibling. Indeed, there is literature to suggest that parents are not
the best at remembering events from their children
’ s past (Wenar,
1961 ;
Wenar & Coulter, 1962 ; see also Halverson, 1988 ). The problem, then, is
that there is no way of knowing the ‘ ground truth ’ (i.e., whether an event did,
or did not, occur) with any great certainty (Goff & Roediger, 1998 ).
As a result, psychologists have developed novel methodologies that do
not rely on obtaining information from outside sources. Garry, Manning,
Loftus & Sherman (1996) devised one such methodology. They asked parti-
cipants to complete a Life Events Inventory (LEI) which asked them to
indicate the likelihood that a list of 40 events (e.g. ‘ got in trouble for calling
911 ’ ; ‘ broke a window with your hand ’ ) had happened to them before the
age of ten. Participants were asked to provide a rating for each event on a
scale from 1 ( ‘ defi nitely did not happen ’ ) to 8 ( ‘ defi nitely did happen ’ ). Two
weeks later participants were asked to imagine some of the events (including
some that had been given a rating of ‘ defi nitely did not happen ’ ) and answer
questions about them. These events were referred to as
‘ critical items
’ .
Participants were then asked to complete the LEI again (on the pretext that
the original had been lost). Garry
et al. (1996) found that the
likelihood
ratings were more likely to change for critical items compared to those that
had not been imagined. Garry et al. (1996) concluded that the mere act of
imagining a false event increased participants ’ subjective confi dence that it had
occurred.
This is known as the imagination infl ation effect and it appears to be robust.
It occurs when participants are asked to imagine recent events (Goff
&
Roediger, 1998 ) as well as implausible and bizarre events (Mazzoni, Loftus &
Kirsch, 2001 ; Thomas & Loftus, 2002 ; Pezdek, Blandon - Gitlin & Gabbay,
2006 ). For example, in a recent experiment, participants were asked to perform,
or imagine performing, familiar ( ‘ check the Pepsi machine for change ’ ) or
bizarre ( ‘ propose marriage to the Pepsi machine ’ ) actions during a campus
walk. Two weeks later, some participants misremembered performing both
familiar and unfamiliar actions that they had, in fact, only imagined themselves
196
Handbook of Psychology of Investigative Interviewing
doing (Seamon, Philbin & Harrison, 2006 ). However, critics question whether
the changes in likelihood ratings are because participants have developed
genuine false beliefs or whether they are the result of regression towards the
mean. This is a statistical artefact where extreme scores on a measure (i.e.,
‘ defi nitely did not happen ’ ) are likely, by chance alone, to become less extreme
(i.e., ‘ possibly might have happened ’ ) when that measure is taken a second
time (Pezdek & Eddy, 2001 ; see reply by Garry, Sharman, Wade, Hunt &
Smith, 2001 ).
A second innovative paradigm is called the false feedback method (Bernstein,
Laney, Morris & Loftus, 2005 ; Laney, Morris, Bernstein, Wakefi eld & Loftus,
2008 ). In false feedback studies, participants are asked to complete a question-
naire about their food preferences. This questionnaire is then fed into a com-
puter for analysis, but the results of the analysis are, in fact, bogus. When the
results of the questionnaire are interpreted, the experimenter tells that partici-
pant that the computer analysis indicates that, as a child, the participant got
sick after eating too much of a certain food (either eggs or dill pickles).
Bernstein and colleagues found that participants who were given this false
feedback were more confi dent that this event had indeed happened than
control participants (Bernstein et al. , 2005 ).
Ongoing c hallenges in f alse m emory r esearch
Despite all the advances made in recent years there is still a number of linger-
ing issues that need to be resolved. The fi rst is that it diffi cult to be sure
whether we are really implanting false memories in laboratory studies. The dif-
fi culty is that any number of intervening processes could produce the same
output (in this case a claim to ‘ remember ’ ). It could be due to a report bias
– a tendency to say ‘ yes ’ . It could be due to increases in subjective confi dence
– being more confi dent that an event could have occurred. It could be due to
holding a genuine belief that the event occurred in the absence of a clear
memory of the event (Ost, 2003 ) or it could be due to having developed a
clear, yet inaccurate, memory of the alleged event(s). There is certainly evi-
dence that some individuals will embellish suggested false beliefs with details
from their own autobiography (see Bernstein et al. , 2005 ). There is also evi-
dence that participants develop fairly detailed false recollections of events that
are suggested to them (Bernstein et al. , 2005 ; Ost, Granhag, Udell & Roos
af Hjelmst ä ter, 2008 ). One current challenge, then, is to investigate which of
these processes are responsible for a given output and the manner in which
these processes are related – in other words, how a belief becomes a fully -
fl edged memory (Mazzoni
& Kirsch,
2002 ; Scoboria, Mazzoni, Kirsch
&
Relyea, 2004 ; Ost et al. , 2008 ).
The second, related, concern centres on the likely consequence of false
beliefs or memories (Smeets et al. , 2005 ). Whilst there is evidence that recov-
ering abuse memories has serious and negative impacts on people
’ s lives
Recovered Memories
197
(Loftus, 1997a ), it is diffi cult to establish whether participants in psychological
experiments continue to accept the truth of the implanted beliefs or memories
once they have left the laboratory. As Smeets and colleagues point out, one
measure of how much someone has truly accepted a suggestion is the extent
to which they would be prepared to change their behaviour as a result of that
suggestion. Recently, psychologists have begun to tackle this question. In
Bernstein et al. ’ s (2005) false feedback study, participants were give a question-
naire about an imaginary barbecue which asked them to indicate which kinds
of food they wo
uld be likely to eat. They found participants who believed the
false feedback about becoming sick as a child after eating too many eggs or
pickles indicated that they would be less likely to choose to eat those foods
than those who did not believe the feedback. Thus, this experiment demon-
strates that false feedback about the likelihood of past events can infl uence
later behaviour but, importantly, only for those participants who believe the
feedback. In a novel twist, Laney, Morris, Bernstein, Wakefi eld & Loftus
(2008) found that the same kind of false feedback could be used to positive
effect to convince participants that, as a child, they really enjoyed eating a
healthy food – in this case, asparagus.
Finally, there are concerns over the defi nition of the subject matter.
The research on false memory has grown almost exponentially over the
past few years. Pezdek & Lam (2007) analysed the psychological literature
and demonstrated that, although the number of studies referring to
‘ false memory
’ increased, the proportion of them dealing with memories
of entire events (e.g., ‘ rich ’ false memories) has remained low (13%). The
highest proportion of studies referred to as ‘ false memory ’ in fact deals with
the DRM word list paradigm (42%) (see also DePrince, Allard, Oh & Freyd,
2004 ). Pezdek & Lam (2007) questioned whether these DRM experiments
are really studies of ‘ false memory ’ in any meaningful sense or whether they
should be referred to as
‘ memory fl aws ’ (see Wade
et al. ,
2007 , for a
rebuttal).
Conclusion
The psychological research presented in this chapter has shown that, under
certain circumstances outside of therapy (e.g. repeated suggestive interviewing
in a psychological laboratory), people will come to report that they remember
events that did not occur. Further research is needed to examine what it is
about these people, or the circumstances in which they fi nd themselves, that
leads them to make false memory reports, which can be vivid and compelling,
yet entirely inaccurate. Practitioners and policy - makers therefore need to be
sensitive to these issues if we are to deal appropriately with cases like Alice ’ s,
to prevent future miscarriages of justice and to ensure that genuine victims of
abuse receive the support they need.
198
Handbook of Psychology of Investigative Interviewing
Acknowledgements
My thanks to Kimberley Wade for constructive comments on a draft of this
chapter, part of which was published as Ost, J. & Wade, K. (2007) . Can we
forget bad memories? British False Memory Society Newsletter , 15 , 4 – 8.
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