False Memories On Police Interrogations

Whose Memory is it Anyway?:

False Memories and their Potential Effects on Police Interrogations

Justin “Ty” Mosier

Middle Tennessee State University Whose Memory is it Anyway?:

False Memories and their Potential Effects on Police Interrogations

Many decisions are made every day based on the films being played in one’s head. However, how certain are we that these memories are film like and do not change? How would one know that the memory has changed? In studies, memories have been shown to not have constancy. They have also shown that memories can be manipulated and false memories can be implanted into your mind. Memories have the potential to be influenced by police interrogations, and it can lead to someone being falsely imprisoned.

These techniques usually involve giving misleading information about the topic to an experimental group without providing this information to the control group. What has been observed is that misled participants usually report the incorrect stimuli over the correct. Participants will often incorporate these incorrect stimuli into their memories, while those participants who did not receive incorrect stimuli usually report more accurate responses (Loftus, 2003). Effects such as these can carry on long after the initial exposure. “Misinformation can sway people when they see biased media coverage about some event that they may have experienced themselves” (Loftus, 2003). Loftus says that misinformation can leave someone vulnerable to biased information. Another way memories can lose ownership is through the implantation of memories. The most common way to achieve that is through the familial informant false-narrative procedure. In this method, the researcher will asks parents for information about their children’s childhood. During the experiment, a true memory and a false memory will be presented. After a few interviews, researchers are successful in convincing some interviewees that the false events that were implanted actually happened (Loftus,

“Did I turn off the coffee pot before we left?” Memory distrust is another way that false memories can have impact life. Guddjonsson defined memory distrust as “a condition were people develop profound distrust of their own memory recollections, as a result of which they are particularly susceptible to relying on external cues and suggestions” (Gudjonsson, 2014, p. 28). He is inferring that when we are not certain about a memory, we can become vulnerable to outside influence over that memory. Usually memory distrust is triggered by an event that leads to people contemplating whether or not they actually did something. This often leads to acceptance of the false memory. Schacter has identified seven flaws in human memory that lead to mistrust of memories. Those flaws include transience, absent-mindedness, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence. These seven flaws working together or independently, can cause memories to become vulnerable to change (Gudjonsson, 2014). These seven flaws play a vital role in the acceptance of the false