Study Shows It’s Relatively Easy to Convince People They Committed a Crime that Never Happened

Innocence Project

Researchers in Canada have proven that it is relatively easy to convince adults that they committed a crime that never happened.  The findings could have implications for police interrogation methods. 

The researchers identified 60 college students who had not been involved in the crimes they intended to questions them about.  The students were questioned in a lab three times for 40 minutes about a week a part.  The interviewers asked the students about two events that they had experienced as a teen.  One was real and the other was either a made up crime (assault, assault with a weapon or theft) or a false emotional event such as a personal injury, an attack by a dog or the loss of a huge sum of money.  Through communicating with the students’ caregivers, all of the false events included some real details about that time in the student’s life.  

The students were probed over the course of the three interviews and urged to use memory strategies to recall more details.  Of the participants who were told they committed a crime, 71% had a false memory of the crime.  A similar percentage, 76.67%, formed false memories of the emotional event.  

Lead researcher Julia Shaw of the University of Bedfordshire told the Association for Psychological Science, “Our findings show that 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.  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.”