False memories and interrogation strategies have become an ethical debate in our courtrooms. There have been many instances of innocent people pleading guilty to a crime they haven’t committed. This has led researchers to conduct experiments that will hopefully change the way detectives question suspects.
In one study 30 students with a clear criminal background volunteered to be apart of a psychological experiment. The researchers started by gathering information from the students families. Then the researchers told the students individually a story containing one fact and one piece of false information about the students past. For half of the students the false information was a crime they committed. For the other half the false information was an emotional event. The researchers then asked the students to explain the event in detail. By the end of the experiment the researchers were surprised to find that 71% of the students whose false event was crime had created a false memory of committing that crime.(Guy,2015) Of the students who were told an emotional event 77% had created a false memory.(Guy, 2015)
These statistics are very scary, it shows how easy it is to implant false memories. These studies were believing that they committed crimes within a few hours. These students did were not threatened or did not have any scare tactics used on them. It is not uncommon for detectives to use tactics similar to this experiment. Officers have tactics that involve true facts and false information about evidence.
In one situation a 17 year old man woke up to find his mother stabbed to death and his father unconscious. When the police arrived the man was in shock, the officers found it suspicious that he was the only family unharmed. He was put through a 5 hour interrogation were detectives made suggestions about the crime. So of which included telling the man that his father saw him murder his mother. After the interrogation the man began to question himself and not to long after confessed to the crime. He spent 17 years in prison until the real criminal was found.
In conclusion false memory tactics are very complex and using these techniques should be used with caution. Law enforcement should have regulations on these types of tactics. Possibly if a trained mental health worker is present in the interrogation. Moreover there have been so many occurrences that there are now organizations created to help victims of wrongful conviction. some of these organizations include The Innocence Project, AIDWYC, and Center for Wrongful Convictions.
Association In Defense of the Wrongfully Accused. Retrieved November 19, 2016, from http://www.seekingjusticefortheinnocent.com/index.php/resources/resources-list/resources-non-profit-organizations/182-385930078
Guy, F. (2015, October 15). Implanting False Memories Of Crime | Crime Traveller. Retrieved November 19, 2016, from http://www.crimetraveller.org/2015/10/implanting-false-memories-of-crime/
I absolutely enjoyed your post. When reading about this in our text and watching the videos in our lectures, I was truly fascinated that this type of occurrence can even happen. It is absolutely scary to know how many innocent individuals are victims in this type of mind altering event. What I find fascinating, and often question is how often does this happen on a daily basis. Our minds are so easy re-formed and our memories can be obscured so easily. This makes me wonder how many fights between a brother and sister could be prevented after a “he said-she said” fight.
I am not too familiar with regulation for criminal interrogations (or even victim interrogations) but I would hope that there is a mental health profession on staff that can either be present during these interrogations, view from a distance and be available for guidance as well as monitoring. But is there really a Dr. George Huang from Law and Order: Special Victims Unit available in every precinct?
Wow, what an interesting experiment. This reminded me of a experiment I saw in a Criminal Justice intro class. The video my professor showed us involved children. These children were told a silly story every time they went to see the researchers. After a period of time, these children started believing these stories that they even began to add to it. When the researchers realized this, they immediately tried to tell them the truth but most of the children held on to their stories. I can’t remember all the details from the video since it’s been a few years, but it was very interesting. What you wrote came off as a bit of a surprise, since I thought it was mainly possible to do it to children, but not so much to adults since you’d think we’re not so easily fooled. Who would have thought?
I found your blog post very interesting. Part of the reason this phenomenon of false memories occurs when people are told they did something they didn’t do is because memories are constructive. Memories are constructed, according to Goldstein (2011), “what people report as memories are constructed by the person based on what actually happened plus additional factors, such as the person’s knowledge, experiences, and expectations”, which can be why people remember things that never happened. In the case of the 17-year-old, who was told that he killed his mother and his unconscious father said he witnessed it, this can be attributed to the misinformation effect. During his five-hour interrogation, where he was repeatedly told he committed the crime, he started to believe that he did, because his creation of the memory changed. This took effect because of the MPI or misleading postevent information, which Goldstein (2011) describes as information that is given to a person after an event takes place that is not accurate. Another good thing to point out about the misinformation effect is, “the misinformation effect shows not only that false memories can be created by suggestion but also provides an example of how different researchers can interpret the same data in different ways” (Goldstein, 2011). Because of this, there has been changes in the way witnesses are interrogated.
References
Goldstein, E. B. (2011). Cognitive Psychology: Connecting mind, research and everyday experience
(Vol. 3). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.
I agree! I think there is always a chance of error when the use of an eye witness testimony is involved in any criminal cases. This is why is it essential to gather all different types of evidence to charge a crime.