New research from the scientific journal Psychological Science suggests that, in just three hours, an interviewer can convince most people to falsely believe that they committed a crime that never actually took place. Some psychologists have long theorized that it is possible for interrogators to use certain techniques to obtain false confessions from suspects by tricking them into believing that they committed the crime in question. The Association for Psychological Science noted that this phenomenon has been observed in the cases of some wrongfully-accused criminal suspects. However, Julia Shaw of the University of Bedfordshire and Stephen Porter at the University of British Columbia decided to put the theory to the test in a lab setting and conducted a study, which was recently published in the scientific journal Psychological Science. The above-embedded video coverage by Discovery Channel‘s DNews describes their findings.
The study, which included 60 adult college students as participants and was funded by the University of British Columbia’s Lashley and Mary Haggman Memory Research Award and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, demonstrated that 71% of those who were suggestively told that they had committed a crime in their youth developed vivid false memories of the event. As a control, 50% of the participants in the study were told instead that they had experienced an emotionally intense event that never took place using the same techniques. 76.67% of those who were asked to describe the false emotional event were found to have similarly developed false memories.
“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 3 hours in a friendly interview environment, where the interviewer introduces a few wrong details and uses poor memory-retrieval techniques,” said Julia Shaw of the study’s findings.
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http://benswann.com/scientific-study-interrogators-can-trick-people-into-falsely-believing-that-they-committed-crimes/
