Photo by Laura Chouette on Unsplash

Miss Prism: ‘Memory, my dear Cecily, is the diary that we all carry about with us.’

Cecily: ‘Yes, but it usually chronicles the things that have never happened, and couldn’t possibly have happened.’

(Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest)

This quote from Wilde catches something really important about our memory - it is our personal recollection of what has happened to us (our unique story - based on our autobiographical memory). And our memories err terribly - and we are often unware of how our memory errs - although Cecily catalogues two of them.

Problems with our memory is a persistent theme in psychological research for more than a century. My title here is taken from a well-known book by the Harvard psychologist, Daniel Schachter, which chronicles ‘The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers’ (here’s a feature piece on the book).

We know our memories are fallible - as Wilde told us - but Schachter tells us the ways in which our memories are fallible, offering a kind of a classification of the ways in which our memory goes wrong.

I describe below Schachter’s classification scheme (with some examples), and then I discuss a really striking and important example of false memory implantation in adults. Implanting false memories in another person turns out to be a fairly straightforward thing to do, if you set it up right.

Memory sins - a classification

1. Transience refers to the decay of memories – something apparent to the first formal statistical quantifier of memory, Hermann Ebbinghaus, who showed recall for nonsense syllables diminished substantially over time. But try and recall the names of everyone you were in school with at the age of 7 - probably, many have faded from memory, especially if you were in a biggish class, and changed schools occasionally;

2. Blocking occurs when one memory interferes with another (as in the ‘tip of the tongue’ phenomenon, where you almost find the correct item from memory – but can’t - formally known as ‘lethologica’). A good example of blocking is when you met someone consistently in one place (your local store), and then happen to encounter them in an unexpected location. Bringing their name to mind might be very hard.

3. Absent-mindedness occurs primarily due to failures of attention - you weren’t paying attention, when you should have been, and the memory was never encoded in the first place.

4. Misattribution happens when a correct memory is retrieved, but the source of the memory is misattributed.

5. Suggestibility occurs where memories are distorted in some way by the provision of new information or leading questions. - this is the example we discuss below.

6. Bias refers to the effects of emotion, age, mood, preparedness, and other variables on memory itself, either on the conditions under which the memory itself was initially acquired, or during recall.

7. Persistence happens when intrusive and disturbing memories persistently intrude into awareness (and is common in post-traumatic stress disorder, where the sounds and images of the traumatic event are persistently intrusive for the sufferer).

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Setting someone for memory implantation

Setting it up means: you need a good storyline, and you must use (fake) social proof provided by trusted others during conversation. The trusted others can be friends, parents, authority figures; the to-be-implanted memory can be a significant event - in the case below, a falsified criminal event.

Other versions of this manipulation have used a (falsified) childhood story of being lost in a shopping mall - the false memory effect is reliable and replicable (here’s the original study).

In both cases, the effects are robust and reliable - about a third to two thirds of people come to believe they committed an offence worthy of police attention, or they became lost in a shopping mall - even though these events never actually happened.

Here's the important and telling paper by Julia Shaw and Stephen Porter, published in Psychological Science (abstract below). The bottom line is that straightforward manipulations (information provided by a caregiver to a target participant) could lead the participants to believe, in the context of episodic memory recall, that they had committed a criminal offence in the past. In essence, have caregivers falsely recall and assert to you that were in trouble with the law at a younger age leads to a dramatic increase in the likelihood that you will come to (falsely) recall legal troubles - despite the trouble never having occurred.

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Conversations turn out to be a really good way of implanting false information!

In the research reported here, we explored whether complete false memories of committing crimes involving police contact could be generated in a controlled experimental setting. If so, we wanted to explore how prevalent they would be and how their features would compare with those of both false memories of other emotional events and true memories. If supposed corroboration by caregivers informs young adults that they committed a crime during adolescence, can they generate such false memories, or do they reject the notion?

Shockingly, disturbingly and probably not too surprisingly, 70% of those allocated to the criminal manipulation condition admitted to believing that they committed a crime they did not in fact commit.

Conclusions? Confessions should be treated as extremely suspect and contaminable trace evidence - ‘leading’ questions and general conversation with a supportive authority figure can implant false memories in a significant fraction of the population at large. Little wonder The Innocence Project has had so many false confessions and convictions overturned when DNA forensic evidence is brought to bear on crimes. Be careful of your own memories - the certainty you experience during seeming recall may be entirely unrelated to what actually happened!

Constructing Rich False Memories of Committing Crime
Julia Shaw and Stephen Porter
Abstract
Memory researchers long have speculated that certain tactics may lead people to recall crimes that never occurred, and thus could potentially lead to false confessions. This is the first study to provide evidence suggesting that full episodic false memories of committing crime can be generated in a controlled experimental setting. With suggestive memory-retrieval techniques, participants were induced to generate criminal and noncriminal emotional false memories, and we compared these false memories with true memories of emotional events.

After three interviews, 70% of participants were classified as having false memories of committing a crime (theft, assault, or assault with a weapon) that led to police contact in early adolescence and volunteered a detailed false account. These reported false memories of crime were similar to false memories of noncriminal events and to true memory accounts, having the same kinds of complex descriptive and multisensory components. It appears that in the context of a highly suggestive interview, people can quite readily generate rich false memories of committing crime. (emphasis added)

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