False Memories On Police Interrogations

Whose Memory is it Anyway?:

False Memories and their Potential Effects on Police Interrogations

Justin “Ty” Mosier

Middle Tennessee State University

Whose Memory is it Anyway?:

False Memories and their Potential Effects on Police Interrogations

Many decisions are made every day based on the films being played in one’s head. However, how certain are we that these memories are film like and do not change? How would one know that the memory has changed? In studies, memories have been shown to not have constancy. They have also shown that memories can be manipulated and false memories can be implanted into your mind. Memories have the potential to be influenced by police interrogations, and it can lead to someone being falsely imprisoned.

The first way that memories are affected is by using leading questions (Loftus, 2003). Leading questions are questions that are phrased to produce an expected answer. A great example of this would be from a study conducted by Elizabeth Lotus, who used leading questions in investigations into car accidents in an attempt to provoke an altered memory.
“I began showing people films of traffic accidents and questioning them in various ways. The question “Did one see the broken headlight?” led to more false reports of a broken headlight than the same question asked with the verb hit. “How fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?” led to higher estimates of speed than a more neutral question that used the verb hit. Moreover, the “smashed” question led more people to later falsely claim that they had seen broken glass when there was none. My early papers concluded that leading questions could contaminate or distort a witness’s memory” (Loftus, 2003, P. 868).
Loftus explains how using leading questions can persuade an interviewee into saying things that were not completely true. These simple questions can have dramatic effects on someone who thinks they are telling the truth, while their statements are often filled with the opposite. These are very small details that could lead to a big impact on eye witness testimonies and have other implications outside of a court room.
Memories can also be affected by the practice of feeding misinformation to unsuspecting individuals.

These techniques usually involve giving misleading information about the topic to an experimental group without providing this information to the control group. What has been observed is that misled participants usually report the incorrect stimuli over the correct. Participants will often incorporate these incorrect stimuli into their memories, while those participants who did not receive incorrect stimuli usually report more accurate responses (Loftus, 2003). Effects such as these can carry on long after the initial exposure. “Misinformation can sway people when they see biased media coverage about some event that they may have experienced themselves” (Loftus, 2003). Loftus says that misinformation can leave someone vulnerable to biased information.

Another way memories can lose ownership is through the implantation of memories. The most common way to achieve that is through the familial informant false-narrative procedure. In this method, the researcher will asks parents for information about their children’s childhood. During the experiment, a true memory and a false memory will be presented. After a few interviews, researchers are successful in convincing some interviewees that the false events that were implanted actually happened (Loftus,

2003).
If the researchers encounter the possibility that events could have actually happened, thus confounding the research, another technique can be employed. In this method, the researcher knows exactly what happened on a certain day, because they witnessed the events.
“If one as a researcher know precisely what happened that day and one lead the participant to “remember” doing something else, one have fairly good evidence that one have created a false report. This strategy was first adopted by Goff and Roediger (1998) and later modified by my colleague and me (Thomas & Loftus, 2002). In one study, participants sat in front of a large table filled with numerous objects. They heard a series of statements (e.g., “flip the coin”) and then had to perform or imagine performing the called-for actions. The next time they came to the lab, there were no objects in front of them, but they simply imagined that they performed various actions. In a final session, their memory for what they did that first day was tested. After a few imaginations, participants occasionally remembered performing actions that they had not performed. They falsely claimed that they did things that would have been common (e.g., roll the dice), but they also claimed that they did things that would have been rather bizarre or unusual, such as “rub the chalk on oner head” or “kiss a plastic frog” (Loftus, 2003, p. 869).
Loftus details how testing memory implantation can happen without the use of a familial informant. These results show that implantation still occurred under these conditions.
The occurrence of false memories has been detailed above. How these memories affect people is equally interesting. Since everyday memories are used to make decisions, decision making can be influenced by false memories, as well. Loftus attempted a study that showed the effects of false memories on decisions.
“We induced participants to believe that when they were children they got sick eating hard-boiled eggs (or, for other participants, that they got sick eating dill pickles). We accomplished this mental feat by gathering data from the participants and plying them with false feedback. We told them that a sophisticated computer program had analyzed their data and determined that they had had one of these “sick” experiences as a child. We found that those given the “dill pickle” feedback became more confident that they had had the experience as a child and those given the “hard-boiled egg” feedback became more confident of that experience.
But would the increase in belief translate into subsequent behavior change? Would they, for example, avoid these foods when given the opportunity to eat them? To find out, we gave participants a “Party Behavior” questionnaire. They imagined themselves at a large barbeque and had to indicate which foods they would like to eat. Those who were seduced by the dill pickle feedback reported being less likely to want to eat pickles, whereas those who fell for the egg feedback reported being less likely to want to eat eggs” (Loftus, 2003, p. 870).
Loftus showed how false memories can affect decisions about life. The subjects were less likely to eat the food from the affected memory. These are just food choices, but the implications of these studies can be seen further.
The impacts of memory implantation are measureable in many ways. Another impact is seen with the memory implantation of crimes. In a study by Julia Shaw and Stephen Porter, they were able to get 70% of interviewees to show signs of having false memories of crimes. In the paper, the author stated that not only could their subjects create these false memories, but they were very rich and detailed (Shaw, 2015). The subjects incorrectly admitted that they had committed crimes against other people that had not occurred. In fact, they had never even had contact with the police. This is just a small peak into what could be happening in police interrogations.
Almost everyone has encountered a situation where they were not completely certain that their own memory could be trusted.

“Did I turn off the coffee pot before we left?” Memory distrust is another way that false memories can have impact life. Guddjonsson defined memory distrust as “a condition were people develop profound distrust of their own memory recollections, as a result of which they are particularly susceptible to relying on external cues and suggestions” (Gudjonsson, 2014, p. 28). He is inferring that when we are not certain about a memory, we can become vulnerable to outside influence over that memory. Usually memory distrust is triggered by an event that leads to people contemplating whether or not they actually did something. This often leads to acceptance of the false memory. Schacter has identified seven flaws in human memory that lead to mistrust of memories. Those flaws include transience, absent-mindedness, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence. These seven flaws working together or independently, can cause memories to become vulnerable to change (Gudjonsson, 2014). These seven flaws play a vital role in the acceptance of the false

memory.
In a study interviewing people who had falsely confessed to committing crimes, they found that people actually believed that they had committed the crime. The study points to five steps that occurs in this process. A trigger event happens, in this case the interrogation, which plants the idea in their mind that they did it. Secondly, plausibility sets in; the person of interest begins wondering if they could have committed the crime. After that, Acceptance comes into play. This happens after questioning and usually during isolation from human contact. Next is reconstruction; after someone accepts that they have committed the crime, they begin to create their own memory of the event- usually with assistance of police evidence. The final step that they argue is resolution, this is when the person has realized they have a false memory. Unfortunately, not every person with a false memory gets to this point (Gudjonsson, 2014). However, it has been show if you warn someone about these effects, they can become resistant to these memory changes (Loftus, 2003).
People often say that memories are subjective. However, that seems like an excuse not to measure those memories and how they affect our lives. Whether memories are subjective or otherwise is not the point. Memories are definitely qualitative in nature but that surely does not mean that they cannot be quantified. Memories are not written in stone and they seem to interact with all facets of our lives. Or as Elizabeth Loftus said, “Who we are may be shaped by our memories, but our memories are shaped by who we are and what we have been led to believe (Loftus, 2003). These studies point to memories not being perfect replications of past events. In fact, it is very possible to push someone to believe that they did something contrary to their memories.