457. The psychology of 'false' memories

0:04 Hello everybody, I'm Gemma Spake and welcome back to the Psychology of Your 20s, the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments and transitions of our 20s and what they mean for our psychology. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. Today, I have another bonus episode for you all. This is part of our debunking psychology series. It's a series where we take common psychology terms, phrases, myths, or ideas and give you the real research and the real science that you deserve so that you really know what's up, including some of the history as well. And today, our target, the topic we are turning our attention to is false science. memories.

0:54 This is one of the biggest questions in psychology, and we've had it for a long time. Can we trust what we remember? How much of what we think happened actually did. False memories and their confusion with repressed memories, their use as a defense in legal proceedings has quite a long very controversial, very painful history in the psychology space that I don't think a lot of people know about.

1:21 So today I thought we'd spell out what they are, how they happen, and the critical research that we can use to show that false memories do exist. And you actually likely have a few. Plus, again, some of those big battles that have been fought that are very, very interesting over the identification or dismissal of the entire idea.

1:43 So without further ado, let's get into it. So first things first, what exactly is a false memory? So a false memory is a is a recollection that is either partly or completely inaccurate. So it might involve remembering an event that never actually occurred, but you heard a lot about it. So you thought you were there. You know, you've attended a party and incorrectly remembering that somebody was there when they weren't, you know, recounting this really amazing moment where you met your partner and saying, and he was wearing this really cool red top and him saying, no, I wasn't. Or that didn't happen that day. You know, it's that sort of stuff where maybe the majority of the memory is sound and is true. And then there

2:33 are these little details that just seem to have changed over time. It's why people disagree over stories all the time. Within your family, you probably had it happen. Somebody says it happened this way. Somebody says it happened another way. Both people deeply believe that they are correct. And it's not that either of them are lying or willfully making things up. These are genuinely stored moments or memories in our mind. Sometimes they just actually didn't happen. They are memories that have been morphed and moved and reconstructed so that they are a little bit off what they used to be. The reason this happens is because our memories aren't perfect and they don't store things in this categorized, beautiful,

3:18 library-esque physical way that we imagine they do. Human memory cannot and does not preserve a perfect file of events that we can just play and replay exactly the same every single time. Instead, every time we access a memory, our brain rebuilds an account using fragments of different things. So it brings together sensory information along with emotion, general knowledge, expectations, things that felt prominent and meaningful at the time, things that didn't feel prominent and meaningful, so get excluded. And we also jump to conclusions and we fill in gaps with what we think should be there while our brain does it for us unconsciously so that we get what feels like a perfectly normal, perfectly rounded memory. There is

4:06 a very famous study that shows how this happens. The study was done in 1995 and the researchers gave people a list of words, a list of related words actually in a sequence. And these words included things like bed, rest, awake, tired, dream, blanket, those sort of things. The word sleep was not shown in that list. However, when people were asked to recall the words that they saw, a lot of participants included words like sleep, like pillow, like, you know, words that weren't there, but felt like they should have been. And they really did believe that they were there because our brain said, well, I'm going to follow this pattern and I'm going to fill in the rest. I'm going to just, I'm going to add a few things in. It might

4:56 actually be helpful, whether it's true or not. This is an example of something we do all the time. We make an educated guess. Our brain makes an educated guess for us without really consulting. Like it doesn't want to present a memory and say, and then this thing, we don't really know what happened. So sorry. It just wants to fill it in. Of course, our everyday memories are a lot more complex than an associated word list. But the principle behind this is the same. And there's a big reason why this happens. This happens because we don't need to and we physically can't remember every single thing that has occurred to us since the day we were born.

5:33 Your brain simply does not have the cognitive capacity to do that. Every single year, you know, thousands and thousands, millions of seconds upon millions of seconds upon millions of seconds and the brain never changes size. Like it just is impossible. So for this reason, Our brain, our minds apply a subjective lens and we eliminate what doesn't feel necessary, both in the moment that it happens and then also in hindsight. Our own imagination also strengthens this as well.

6:03 This previous process is why we often find that we lose memories or we shorten or sharpen memories. We can also create completely new memories or expand a situation that was once this very normal thing into something a lot bigger and more complex. There was a 1996 study on this. And in this study, researchers asked participants to imagine a series of childhood events. Then they added in some that hadn't actually occurred. And they asked participants questions like, hey, remember the time that you went to that beach party with these people? How did you feel? Can you imagine when that happened? What were the details of that like?

6:44 What happened? What about when your cousin did that thing? Explain that. Describe that. Give me some more information about that. Now, just imagining something, when they just gave that prompt for somebody to simply imagine that that had happened, it gave the whole thing a deeper sense of truth. And a lot of these participants started to actually then recite these memories as if they were their own. When the researchers knew they hadn't happened, we told you to think about it.

7:16 And that process of thinking about it and imagining it And adding your own details is what made it feel real. So this became known as imagination inflation, which is just like such a great term. Imagination inflation, great band name. Essentially, repeatedly picturing an event makes it easier and more familiar to retain and to return to. And it happens all the time. Now, imagining something once, especially something you know isn't real, doesn't necessarily mean that you've created a false memory.

7:51 What is required is a level of plausibility, a level of repetition and some kind of personal relevance of the event as well or of the detail. So any detail that gets added in, anything that you kind of accidentally create for yourself has to feel real. So it's often borrowed from other events or borrowed from other people's memories.

8:22 Other people have a massive influence on our false memories and what we remember and what we don't. This is called the misinformation effect. When misleading information is encountered after an event, especially from somebody that we trust or know, and then we are later asked to recall that event, often that misleading information is gets added in without us even realizing it. We know this from a very famous 1974 study from Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer, where they basically showed how somebody else dabbling in somebody's memory or memory consolidation can really change how they remember something. Now, this study from Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer is possibly one of the most famous psychology studies in the world,

9:16 So if you have ever done a psychology course, a class, a degree, I'm really sorry. You've definitely heard about it before. But it's still super important to say again. In this study, participants watched a film or films of traffic accidents. And then they were asked this question. And this question differed for each one of them. Some people were asked, okay, how fast was the car going when it smashed into the other car? Some of them were asked how fast was it going when it collided, when it bumped, when it hit, when it made contact. The event stayed the same.

9:54 It was the same video each time. The only thing that changed was that somebody else came in and used a certain selection of words the only thing that changed was the verb in the question what they found was that participants who heard the word smashed who heard the word collided gave much higher speed estimates than those who heard the word made contact or bumped, because they kind of trusted that if somebody else was using these words, well, you know, they probably also had a more accurate opinion or a more accurate view, even though they had experienced it themselves. What they found was that later on, when people were again asked to tell them some details about this car accident, sometimes two or three weeks later, people

10:42 who had heard the word smashed, they started saying, well, I saw glass everywhere. I saw blood everywhere. They saw people very much hurt. Even when those things actually didn't happen. There was no glass. There was no blood. But they genuinely believed it. All because somebody had used one single word that skewed how they consolidated and remembered something. Memory is incredibly social. And it doesn't take much from other people, either deliberately or accidentally, to change how we perceive our own memories. So. I mentioned the criminal justice system before.

11:20 What do false memories have to do with the law? Turns out, a whole lot. Most false memories are pretty mundane. You know, you remember putting your keys on the table, they're actually in your coat. You think that you replied to that person, you didn't, you accidentally just typed out the message. You know, you and your cousin can't remember who got what present for Christmas in, you know, 2005.

11:42 But when someone has committed a crime or has been accused of a crime... the stakes are much higher. Eyewitness testimonies carry significant weight in legal settings, but those testimonies are shaped by the same reconstructive processes that affect all memory. Eyewitnesses are often asked to recall events that were really stressful, confusing, happened under poor light from a distance, they were very quick, they maybe didn't see a complete accurate situation unfold. These conditions can limit how much accurate detail is encoded in the first place. But also when you have a police officer or a lawyer or a judge asking you to remember something accurately, saying, well, that sounds about right. No,

12:28 that doesn't sound right. Who is exposing you to other information and saying it all comes down to you. You know, you better get this right. It's hard for our memories to not be reconstructed in a way that fits what somebody else wants from you and is telling you. even if you don't consciously realize it. False memories are widely considered to be one of the most significant sources of error in the justice system. According to data from the Innocent Project in the United States, eyewitness misidentification has played a role in 69% of wrongful convictions that were later overturned by DNA evidence, including death penalty cases. People have been sentenced to death based on eyewitness testimonies that we

13:14 now know were completely inaccurate. But people swore, like they swore to the day they died, I saw him, I saw that, I saw them, I know what I saw. And they didn't. They didn't. It was because a false memory had been created that they could not identify. Here is how something like this happens. So after an event takes place, memories are still very malleable and they're open to manipulation. So if somebody who has maybe witnessed a crime is then exposed to news coverage or discusses what happens with their friends, they view images of suspects or they are interviewed, each of these experiences can subtly alter how events are remembered, including the introduction of new details or reinforcing different interpretations. Feedback and reassurance is also a

14:02 really critical factor in this. In 1998, these two researchers, Gary Wells and Amy Bradfield, showed participants a security video, and then they asked them to identify the gunman that was showed in this security video from a lineup, a photographic lineup of people. The real gunman was not included in this lineup, meaning that every single identification was going to be incorrect. Every single person chose someone, And a lot of witnesses were like, I'm absolutely sure that this is them because they imagined that somebody in that situation, somebody in that lineup would have to look like the person that had done it, would have to be the person that they had done it. So their minds were like, we'll choose the one that's closest. Some witnesses were also

14:48 then given confirming feedback. So phrases like, yep, thank you for that. That does seem to match the subject or information we have on the subject or Yep, those details are very important to us. It's very valuable. The information you've given is very significant. They were not told, yes, you were absolutely right or no, that's not the person.

15:11 They were just told that what they had given, the information they had given was valuable. After receiving this feedback, witnesses then doubled down and they got more and more confident that who they had chosen was absolutely the person who these researchers slash police officers slash I don't know, detectives were after. They also retrospectively were like, oh no, I paid a lot more attention at the time than they did. A lot of them said I had a much better view. A lot of them said, well, I actually, you know, they misidentified that the footage was in color when it was actually in black and white. And again, they were incredibly sincere. They could not notice, they did not realize that a false memory had been implanted. This

15:57 is why These days, there are all these recommendations that if a police officer, a detective is doing an investigation that involves an eyewitness testimony or an eyewitness, they have to do double blind lineups. So where even they don't know who the suspect is, so there's less chance they give any indication that the witness has given the correct answer.

16:19 They are also recommended to not speak to the person who is doing a lineup, to give clear instructions that the perpetrator may not be present. and to immediately record the witness's confidence. They're not allowed to say anything to persuade or deny them and they do not want the witness to talk about the event with anybody else because all of that influences how somebody's memories about an event are stored. The influence false memories have had on criminal convictions is really important to know because it is so deep and it's only in probably the last 20 years that people have been like maybe we shouldn't trust that, especially as people have started to do these studies where they've been like, look how easy it is to make

17:02 somebody believe something that did not happen. But then in the 1990s, something else happened. And that woman, Elizabeth Loftus, who ran that first very famous study, wanted to bring attention to something even more serious that was coming up with the popularity of false memories and the idea of repressed memories. Let's talk about it after this short break.

17:32 So a repressed memory is a concept that was first introduced by Sigmund Freud. And it's this idea of memories that have been buried by trauma and they are only revealed and they only come back up later in life, often with the help of a specific kind of therapy called recovered memory therapy. During the 1980s and 1990s, this idea was popular. It was everywhere. There were so many people doing recovered memory therapy. And of course, there was then a huge rise in people reporting memories, repressed memories of childhood abuse that they said they had no idea about, they could not remember until they became adults. Now, these memories included violence. They included things like sexual assault. But

18:16 they also included really intense accounts of cannibalism, satanic rituals, witnessing mass murder. The level of people who were reporting this was, it's actually hard to overstate, it was everywhere and therapists were really split down the middle. Could these awful and really extreme things have happened to so many people?

18:37 A lot of therapists said, yes, you should always believe the patient. You have no idea what people have been through. You have no idea how seemingly normal people could turn out really, really evil. These things do happen Don't be naive. The other half in this clinical space, in this discipline, were like, okay, well, what methods were used that allowed these people to suddenly access such intense memories? What about in situations, particularly those very extreme situations, where somebody has said, you know, I saw my father murder and eat three people, or I saw my pastor sacrifice a baby, but there was no other evidence of that. What about, you know, people who recount these things and then later say, hey,

19:26 actually that never happened, of which a lot of people were doing en masse. There was an amazing episode on this, podcast episode on this, by This American Life called An Epidemic Created by Doctors that is worth listening to and some of the people who got stuck in the crossfire of this. But this period is often referred to as the memory wars. And it's really difficult to portray how many people this affected. There were some really insanely high-profile legal cases where people were accused by family members of doing just awful things and they were charged and then later the charges were completely dropped. They found, like, actually there was no evidence of this. In 1994, there was a father who successfully sued his daughter's therapist after she

20:13 accused him of abuse based on memories that had surfaced during therapy. And the court found that basically the therapist had used all these suggestive methods. Even the daughter now realized this stuff didn't happen. And in response, there were these advocacy groups that formed on both sides. Some supporting survivors of abuse and emphasizing the reality of trauma. and emphasizing the fact that people need to be believed. And the other side representing people who were like, I actually think that this therapist has, or therapists, multiple, have, you know, used really strange methods that have created memories that didn't actually happen to me. For example, in a lot of these cases, therapists use tools like drug-induced hypnosis, guided imagery.

21:00 They interpreted dreams for patients in which they would say, Well, that dream, that dream indicates that your father or mother must have hurt you because somebody for whom, you know, their father or mother didn't hurt them wouldn't have a dream like that. So did they? What happened? Or they would indicate to somebody, well, if you're having those experiences or those symptoms, the only people who experience those things are somebody who's experienced severe trauma or severe abuse. So what do you remember? What happened to you? Something must have happened to you. If you're feeling this way, my clinical guidelines say that you must have experienced something awful.

21:33 And a lot of the time patients would be like, I really actually had a really normal childhood. I'm just dealing with this. I'm just dealing with that. And they would say, no, if I had a patient like you, something's happened to them. So let's go digging. Let's go probing. And over months and months, sometimes years and years, they would create or accidentally implant memories of abuse because they were so sure that it had happened that hadn't. You know, these people were incredibly vulnerable. These methods were incredibly persuasive.

22:04 And so over time, false memories were implanted and became a huge part of somebody's identity. This was where the concept of false memory syndrome first emerged. It was used to describe cases in which a person's identity and their relationships become organized around a strongly, deeply held belief and memory around something traumatic having happened to them, that there was actually very limited evidence had actually happened. There was one woman who literally was like, I survived 9-11. She completely believed it because a therapist said, well, your fear of flying must have come from such a severe extreme thing that was repressed. And she genuinely believed that she had escaped 9-11 and completely forgotten about it. And that's

22:49 where her fear of flying was coming from. So nowadays, if you are conducting this type of repressed memory therapy as a therapist, Medical malpractice schemes will not insure you. You cannot obtain certain licenses to operate. You cannot work in certain institutions. You cannot work in certain states. It is incredibly controversial. I want to be very clear here.

23:13 The fact that false memories can form and did en masse during this period does not mean that all reports of abuse are false or even usually false. It does not mean that trauma survivors are unreliable. And it does not mean that every memory that comes back to somebody after a period of not thinking about it is implanted or fabricated. You know, there are a lot of researchers on the opposing side who still, even though they said this is probably not right that so many people are experiencing repressed memories, repressed memories do still exist. They are real, but they're not as common as we think. And they normally don't lead to a complete change. recreation of somebody's past where there are no other signs that something has

24:01 gone wrong. The concern here arises because this type of therapy works backwards. In this type of therapy, research, well, therapists were saying, I believe this has happened to you based on this limited evidence. And then they searched for more evidence and they created more evidence and in a highly suggestive setting, rather than just letting a patient sit, feel, reveal, and discuss on their own. And in this environment, there's also the fact that a therapist is an authority figure.

24:33 They've studied for this. They're very smart. They see hundreds of people. They must know what they are talking about. And so their guesses and their suggestions became more real. In ethical therapy, clinicians are really encouraged to create a space where experiences are explored carefully, without pressure, and they do not confirm or pick a side when it comes to a particular narrative. For example, if you've read the American Psychological Association guidelines recently, which I don't think many people have, but if you have, you'll know that they now advise therapists to remain neutral rather than approaching recovered memories with a preconceived conclusion. They advise that you avoid techniques that might unintentionally shape or suggest specific memories or

25:18 allow them to form. And they definitely say don't use drugs to hypnotize people and then have them recall childhood abuse that may or may not have happened as you tell them stories of childhood abuse that may or may not have happened. It's probably not going to go well either way. So with all this in mind, where do we stand with the idea of false memories today? And what can we take from this research? Because false memories do exist and can be harmful, but does that mean that all memories that come up later on need to be dismissed? And does it mean that we can trust ourselves?

25:55 So what can we take from this episode? Number one, we know that memory is reconstructive and we know that it's not perfectly stored and permanent. So yes, as time goes on and we repeat or rehash a memory, specifically with other people, socially, more details can get added in. In most cases, this often means changing an old memory in a slightly, in a small micro way. You know, somebody remembers the wrong color of shirt, remembers the wrong song that was playing, that kind of thing. But in serious cases, especially where there is an authority figure, there is a police officer, there is a researcher, there is a doctor, there is a judge, there is a lawyer, and you're under pressure and something deeply emotional has happened,

26:42 it can change the details of a memory so greatly that that there are real-world consequences, even such as false confessions. I was going to say false eyewitness testimony, which is definitely true, but even false confessions. Number two, does that mean false memories are just lies? No. Someone can describe an inaccurate event entirely sincerely, vividly, with great emotional conviction, and not actually be trying to deceive anybody. They fully believe what has happened and the way that it has happened, even if it's not accurate. It's because we want to trust what we believe and what we feel. Does that mean we can't trust what we believe and what we feel?

27:20 Yes and no. The majority of what we remember is accurate. However, it will be personalized. What you pay attention to at the time and your interpretation of things may not match up with somebody else's. That means both people can be wrong, but also both people can be right. They've just absorbed and noted different things. Our memories work incredibly well and incredibly accurately. But we also must acknowledge that we, as fallible creatures with limited cognitive capacity, we're just vulnerable to influence.

27:50 We're vulnerable, like we're social creatures. When we hear what other people have to say, when we watch the news, when somebody else tells us something, it's hard to completely dismiss that. But that doesn't mean we need to be afraid or feel like we're losing our grip on reality. This is happening to every single one of us. Especially with phones and with new ways of storing memories and storing information, there is more ways to confirm or deny what you remember and whether it's accurate. And when it comes to the important stuff, you just have to be clear and have your convictions, write stuff down, and just be aware of how your memory can be changed accidentally or deliberately because of somebody else's influence. That, my friends,

28:36 was our mini bonus episode on the psychology and the scientific truth, or at least scientific debates to do with false memories. I love when we get into some of the more historical stuff because the history of psychology is so rich and controversial and fascinating. And there is just so much that I think the average person doesn't know about.

28:58 Simple things that we take for granted now, myself included. I didn't know about the memory wars until I started studying psychology and I would really recommend going and listening to that This American Life episode, which was, I think the title is An Epidemic Created by Doctors, if you have any interest in this. I know it's one of those hard ones where you want to say conclusively, does this exist or does it not? But it's difficult. And listening to that episode, I feel like really opened my eyes to my own opinions about those things. So go and listen to it if you have any further interest in this idea of false memories. Thank you as always to our researcher Libby for her help with this episode.

29:38 If you want more episodes specifically like this one, I'm going to leave a link in the description to a playlist that we made of all of our debunking psychology episodes for you to enjoy. There's some really good ones in there. My personal favorite is the one on Stockholm Syndrome and also the one on personality tests. I And I recommend it to people all the time. So if you want more episodes like this, if you're on a road trip, if you're just looking for something interesting to listen to, all will be down there in the description. Remember, you can also watch full episodes on Netflix. You can follow us on Instagram or on Substack. And reach out if you have any further questions about this idea, this concept,

30:14 this false memory theory. Until next time, be safe, be kind, be gentle to yourself. We will talk very, very soon. Music