Name Test

Suggestibility Incorporate misleading info into personal recollections

Plane Crash in Amsterdam Killed 39 residents of apartment building and plane crew Dominated news for days 10 months later, researchers asked people “Did you see the TV film of the moment the plane hit the apartment building?” 55 – 66% said yes

Did this occur in class during exercise? Read magazine Play cards Look at phone File nails Eat sandwich Drink water Brush hair Drink coffee Eat chocolate Read book

Missouri Case excerpt

Witness confidence Highly confident witness no more accurate Inflated when told another witness made same id or by rehearsing testimony Confirming feedback of any sort Hypnosis rarely elicits info not available otherwise and frequently bolsters witness confidence (possibly used to save face)

Cognitive Interview Ask witness to report everything about the incident Ask witness to try to reinstate the context or setting Recall in different temporal order Retell from different perspectives

False Confessions – Why? End abusive questioning Get attention False memory – memory distrust syndrome, interrogative suggestibility

False Memory Syndrome Remembering abuse in psychotherapy that never happened Visual imagery of event Dream interpretation Earliest memories from 3-5 years, but can visualize memory from infancy Source of alien abduction memories?

Suggestibility in Preschool Children Spontaneous recollections tend to be accurate Responses to specific questions more likely to include distortions When interviewed twice, new details highly likely to be inaccurate Difficulty with source information – repeated questioning gives details that begin to feel real Social pressure

Bias Influence of current knowledge and beliefs on how we remember our past

Many types of bias Consistency and change bias – reconstruct the past as overly similar to, or different from, the present Hindsight bias – filtered by current knowledge Egocentric bias – role of self in orchestrating memory Stereotypical bias – generic memories shape interpretation of the world

Consistency bias Past experiences of pain influenced by current level of pain Political, social and religious issues Relationships

Change bias Improvement programs (diet, exercise, exam prep classes) Relationships (want to believe they have improved, so remember the past as worse than it was so the present seems better in contrast) Dissonance reduction

Hindsight bias (I knew it all along) Sporting events Elections 2 nd opinion in medicine Home appraisals Inadmissible evidence

Egocentric bias Tend to recall our own actions and words more readily than those of others View more desirable character traits as more descriptive of themselves than the average person (but the majority of us are not above average) Reasons for failed relationship Exaggerating past difficulties

Stereotype bias Stereotypes enable us to save energy by thinking in terms of categories of people Sometimes we add in info to reconcile seemingly incongruous data – something to explain why our stereotype did not hold

Persistence More likely for highly emotional memory (terror) Rumination vs disclosure