Neuroscience
Say someone’s mugged outside the office window – you know what happens next, everyone starts talking about it. The problem for police investigators is that the witnesses start contaminating each other’s memories. But do you think a witness’s memory would be most prone to distortion following a big group chat about the event, or following a one-on-one conversation?
Andrea Dalton and Meredyth Daneman have found our memories are most susceptible to misinformation following a one-on-one conversation, and whereas previous research has focused on peripheral information that’s not that relevant, Dalton and Daneman have shown how easily people’s memories can be distorted for information central to what just happened.
In their study, 89 students watched a five-minute clip from the film Inner Space. They then discussed the clip, either alone with one other student who was actually an accomplice of the researchers, or in a four to six-person group that included the accomplice. In both cases the accomplice said some true things about the clip but also mentioned some deliberately inaccurate things – these were either central to what happened (e.g. that the main character had avoided colliding with a car, when in fact he had hit it), or were peripheral (e.g. he got the name of the shopping mall that was featured wrong).
Afterwards the participants read 16 statements about the clip, including some of the false statements made by the researchers’ accomplice. Crucially, participants who’d discussed the clip one-on-one with the accomplice said his false statements were true 68 per cent of time whereas participants who’d had a group discussion accepted his statements 49 per cent of the time.
This sometimes included the misremembering of central events – participants accepted false statements about central events made by the accomplice 35 per cent of time (versus 82 per cent for peripheral events, and 10 per cent for false statements about central events not mentioned by the accomplice).
“A thorough investigation of the extent to which eyewitnesses’ memories can be altered may contribute to greater acknowledgements within the justice system that absolute reliance on even the most convincing of testimonials may be dangerous”, the researchers said.
_________________________________
Dalton, A.L. & Daneman, M. (2006). Social suggestibility to central and peripheral misinformation. Memory, 14, 486-501.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
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Neuroscience
Did you see what just happened?
Say someone’s mugged outside the office window – you know what happens next, everyone starts talking about it. The problem for police investigators is that the witnesses start contaminating each other’s memories. But do you think a witness’s memory would be most prone to distortion following a big group chat about the event, or following a one-on-one conversation?Andrea Dalton and Meredyth Daneman have found our memories are most susceptible to misinformation following a one-on-one conversation, and whereas previous research has focused on peripheral information that’s not that relevant, Dalton and Daneman have shown how easily people’s memories can be distorted for information central to what just happened.
In their study, 89 students watched a five-minute clip from the film Inner Space. They then discussed the clip, either alone with one other student who was actually an accomplice of the researchers, or in a four to six-person group that included the accomplice. In both cases the accomplice said some true things about the clip but also mentioned some deliberately inaccurate things – these were either central to what happened (e.g. that the main character had avoided colliding with a car, when in fact he had hit it), or were peripheral (e.g. he got the name of the shopping mall that was featured wrong).
Afterwards the participants read 16 statements about the clip, including some of the false statements made by the researchers’ accomplice. Crucially, participants who’d discussed the clip one-on-one with the accomplice said his false statements were true 68 per cent of time whereas participants who’d had a group discussion accepted his statements 49 per cent of the time.
This sometimes included the misremembering of central events – participants accepted false statements about central events made by the accomplice 35 per cent of time (versus 82 per cent for peripheral events, and 10 per cent for false statements about central events not mentioned by the accomplice).
“A thorough investigation of the extent to which eyewitnesses’ memories can be altered may contribute to greater acknowledgements within the justice system that absolute reliance on even the most convincing of testimonials may be dangerous”, the researchers said.
_________________________________
Dalton, A.L. & Daneman, M. (2006). Social suggestibility to central and peripheral misinformation. Memory, 14, 486-501.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
- People With Exceptional Autographical Memory Are Still Prone To False Memories
It's only in the last few years that researchers have documented the existence of a select group of individuals who have memories like a diary. Give them a random date from the past and they can tell you what they were doing that day, they can name...
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Memories of child abuse, long buried, but suddenly recovered in therapy, have been a source of controversy for some time now. The fear is that such memories are false; that they are the product of suggestion, hypnosis, visualisation or other therapeutic...
- Mind Where You Sit - How Being In The Middle Is Associated With Superior Performance
If you’re going for a group interview, or if you want to make an impression in class, try to sit as centrally as you can – new research suggests observers tend to overestimate the performance of people located in the centre. Priya Raghubir and Ana...
- The Bystander Phenomenon Revisited
The case of Kitty Genovese who was murdered in New York in 1964 in full view of 39 witnesses who did nothing to help, triggered a series of seminal research papers by John Darley and Bibb Latane on what was dubbed the ‘bystander phenomenon’ – the...