Forced fabrication and false eyewitness memories
2016
To investigate whether participants might develop false memories of their forced
fabrications, we have employed a modified version of the misinformation paradigm originally developed by E. Loftus (e.g., Loftus, Miller, & Burns, 1978). As
in the typical eyewitness suggestibility study, in the forced fabrication paradigm,
all participants view an eyewitness event, are subsequently exposed to a suggestive
manipulation, and are later tested on their memory for the witnessed event, with
the goal of assessing whether the suggestive manipulation has contaminated the
originally witnessed memory. Where the forced fabrication paradigm differs from
the traditional paradigm is in the nature of the suggestive manipulation. In the
traditional paradigm, the experimenter provides some piece of false or misleading
information, typically by presupposing its existence in an interview questionnaire
or narrative description of the event the participant is asked to read. In the forced
fabrication paradigm, by contrast, rather than being told some falsehood, participant-witnesses engage in face-to-face interviews with the experimenter where,
in addition to answering questions about true events they did witness, they are
asked “false event” questions about blatantly nonexistent objects or events and
are pressed to provide answers to these unanswerable questions. Importantly, the
participant-witness is not permitted to evade the interviewer’s request to provide
an answer to the false-event questions. Rather, participants are informed ahead of
time that they must respond to all questions, even if they have to guess. Although
participants resist answering these false-event questions, the interviewer “forces”
them to comply by repeatedly insisting that they just “give their best guess” until
participants eventually acquiesce by providing a relevant response.
- Correction
- Source
- Cite
- Save
- Machine Reading By IdeaReader
1
References
0
Citations
NaN
KQI