How Susceptible Are We to False Memories?

Recent studies underscore the difficulty of implanting entirely fictional events in a person's recollection

- BERNICE ANDREWS AND CHRIS R. BREWIN

HOW MUCH CAN WE TRUST our memories? We know that our mind keeps an imperfect record of the past. We can forget or misremember details, with frustrating consequences. Our attention can be diverted in ways that make it all too easy to miss key events.

But a particularly disturbing idea is that we readily form false memories—that is, that we can become convinced we experienced something that never actually occurred. The suggestion that it is easy to create false memories of entire events is often used to cast doubt on the reliability of a plaintiff's testimony in a court case. For example, lawyers representing movie executive Harvey Weinstein cited this idea to raise questions about several women's allegations against him.

Recently we had the opportunity to take a closer look at this concept by analyzing data from a study designed to replicate one of the most iconic experiments on false memories to date.

This experiment, by American psychologists Elizabeth Loftus and Jacqueline Pickrell, was published in 1995. Loftus had demonstrated decades earlier that one can manipulate people's memories of visual details by posing questions that contain misinformation. She then wanted to learn whether it was possible to implant an entire false memory for a childhood event that had never happened. To that end, in the 1995 study, she and Pickrell misled participants into believing that, according to their parents or older sibling, when they were about five years old they had been lost in a shopping mall and then found by an older woman.