People Can Be Convinced Of Committing Crimes They Did Not

According to a new study, it is easy to fool most people that they committed a crime they didn't---or maybe that they did something that didn't even happen.

Researchers from Britain's University of Bedfordshire and Canada's University of British Columbia based their research on a questionnaire that was completed by the primary caregivers of 60 university students. Relatives were asked to describe various events that the students went through between 11 and 14 years.

When they got the surveys, psychologists asked students about their past, "in a series of three 40-minute friendly interviews".

Researchers found that almost 70 percent of those who took the survey were convinced that they had done something wrong, including "theft, assault, or injury with a weapon" leading to questioning by the police.

Published in 'Psychological Science', the people who were interviewed "internalized" whatever they were told and later retold all the details even though they did not happen. With "suggestive memory-retrieval techniques," those who were asked questions started "criminal and noncriminal emotional false memories" that were compared with "true memories of emotional events," according to the study.

Initially, researchers had conversations with student about two teenage experiences, with just one of them being real. Participants were asked to recollect everything that had happened in the experiences.

Whenever the test subjects faced some trouble to explain what had happened to them, the psychologist pushed them further and told them to recollect whatever they could, asking them to follow some "specific memory strategies" that might make them remember further, according to rt.com.

In the second and third interviews, the process was repeated. They were asked to remember a much as they could.

"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 University of Bedfordshire, a co-author of the study.

"In such circumstances, inherently fallible and reconstructive memory processes can quite readily generate false recollections with astonishing realism," said Shaw. "In these sessions we had some participants recalling incredibly vivid details and re-enacting crimes they never committed."

This is the first study of its kind that provides evidence suggesting that "full episodic false memories of committing crime can be generated in a controlled experimental setting," according to the study.

Out of the 30 students whose "false event" involved some criminal activity, 21 were documented as thinking of a "false memory" after the interviews. Eleven out of 15 students who thought they were involved in "crime" described the nature and "details of their exact dealings with police."

Those who believed wrongly that they had committed crimes indicated that they had tried to remember and visualize the false event at home, on an average of five times, without suspecting they were being manipulated into something they did not do.

"Understanding that these complex false memories exist, and that 'normal' individuals can be led to generate them quite easily, is the first step in preventing them from happening," Shaw concluded. "By empirically demonstrating the harm 'bad' interview techniques - those which are known to cause false memories - can cause, we can more readily convince interviewers to avoid them and to use 'good' techniques instead."