Implanting False Memories: Lost in the Mall & Paul Ingram
In 1990 George Franklin became the first ever US citizen convicted of murder by a witness who recovered repressed memories more than 20 years after the event. The fact that the witness was Franklin's daughter, Eileen, ensured the case was splashed across the news media. Franklin was released in 1996 after 6 years in prison when irregularities were discovered in Eileen's evidence: it emerged she had been hypnotised before testifying.
There is a good reason why hypnotised witnesses are barred from testifying in some jurisdictions: under hypnosis people are highly suggestible. Even without hypnosis, studies show that people's memories are open to influence. But, can it be demonstrated in the lab that memories for entirely false events can be implanted?
False memories are hard to research for one simple reason: it's difficult to verify whether the memories in question are false or not (Loftus, 1993). Often a considerable amount of time has passed since the original event and it's not possible to corroborate what people say. But, while it's difficult, it's not impossible - it just takes some concerted effort.
Lost in the mall
Elizabeth Loftus, Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Irvine, has been at the forefront of psychological research into repressed memories and testified in George Franklin's case. She has also carried out some fascinating research into the possibility of implanting false memories.
In a seminal study Loftus and Pickrell (1995) recruited 24 participants who were to be presented with four stories from when they were between 4 and 6 years old, three of which were true, and one false. To get the true stories, the researchers spoke to participants' relatives to get three events for each person which had really happened. The events were chosen so that they were not traumatic or emotionally difficult to recall.
Each family was also asked to provide the circumstances of another event that could possibly have happened, but didn't. In each case the false memory was for getting lost in a shopping mall. Relatives provided details of a specific shopping mall it could have been along with other details to make the fake story plausible. They also confirmed that an event like this had not actually occurred.
Do you remember this?
Participants themselves were told they were involved in a study about their ability to recall details of childhood memories. Each participant was first sent a written description of the four events their relatives had outlined - three being real and one fake. They were then asked to write down which events they remembered and more details of the events those events.
Then, soon after, participants were interviewed. At this point they were reminded about the four memories and asked to recall as much as they could about them. At a second interview a week later, a similar procedure was followed. At the end of both interviews participants rated the clarity of their memories.
It was then revealed to them that one of the memories was false and they were asked to guess which one it was. Of the 24 participants, 5 falsely recalled the made up 'lost in the mall' event as a real memory, although participants understandably found the implanted memory much less clear.
This may seem like quite an unimpressive proportion, but considering the very low level of suggestion or coercion involved in the interviews, it does at least show the possibility of implanting false memories.
A later study with more participants which examined a wider range of memories was carried out by Hyman and Pentland (1996). This found that, depending on experimental variables, at least some kind of false memory could be implanted in between 20% and 40% of participants.
But psychologists have done better. In a fantastically titled paper, 'A picture is worth a thousand lies', Kimbereley Wade and colleagues used a doctored photograph of a fictitious balloon flight to implant false memories (Wade, Garry, Read & Lindsay, 2002). Using similar interview procedures to Loftus and Pickrell (1995), they found that 50% of participants created either complete or partial false memories of the flight.
The bizarre case of Paul Ingram
Critics argue that the problem with these sorts of studies is that they only implant inconsequential memories. Traumatic memories, such as those claimed by George Franklin's daughter, might be a completely different matter. This is a fair point and difficult to refute because it would be highly unethical to implant traumatic memories into participants.
Well, actually this has been done, in one of the most bizarre and dramatic false memory experiments ever documented.
In 1988 Paul Ingram, a police officer, was arrested for sexually abusing his two daughters, an allegation he strongly denied. Over an extended period of five months, however, he was subjected to pressure by fellow police officers, psychologists and other advisors, suggesting he had committed child abuse, including having raped his own daughters.
Eventually Ingram began to confess to all manner of rapes, child sexual abuses and even to participation in a Satan-worshipping cult which had allegedly murdered 25 babies.
At one point the prosecution brought in the renowned memory researcher, Dr Richard Ofshe, now Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He was asked to interview Ingram. Ofshe soon became suspicious of Ingram's credibility. In order to test Ingram, he made up a story that his son and daughter claimed he had forced them to have sex with each other while he watched. This was something Ofshe confirmed with both son and daughter had not actually happened.
Over a period of hours, and despite initially denying the memory, Ingram slowly began to generate these false memories. Ultimately Ingram wrote a three-page confession to a crime that was completely fabricated. What else might he have fabricated under this kind of intense pressure?
Unfortunately for Paul Ingram, Ofshe's report wasn't issued until after he had already confessed to the crimes and been convicted. He was then unable to withdraw his guilty plea. Paul Ingram remained in jail until 2003 and is still a registered sex offender despite many doubting his guilt.
--
The case of Paul Ingram along with the experimental studies on false memories probably represent two extremes of a continuum. At one end, when politely asked within the context of a psychology study, some people can be induced into believing relatively benign false memories. Perhaps as many as 50%. At the other end, when placed under incredible psychological pressure, like Paul Ingram, who knows what people will claim to remember.
This post is part of a series on the seven sins of memory:
- How Quickly We Forget: The Transience of Memory
- Absent-Mindedness: A Blessing in Disguise?
- On the Tip-of-the-Tongue: Blocked Memories
- How Memories are Distorted or Invented: Misattribution
- When Suggestibility is a Liability: Wrongful Convictions
- Wrongful Conviction: 50% of Mistaken Eyewitnesses Certain After Positive Feedback
- » Implanting False Memories: Lost in the Mall & Paul Ingram
- Therapists Can Implant False Beliefs and Memories
- How the Consistency Bias Warps Our Personal and Political Memories
- The Persistence of Memory
» If you enjoyed this post, subscribe to PsyBlog (RSS).
[Image credit: michaelrighi]
References
Hyman, I. E., Jr., & Pentland, J. (1996). The role of mental imagery in the creation of false childhood memories. Journal of Memory and Language, 35, 101-117.
Loftus, E. F. (1993). The reality of repressed memories. American Psychologist, 48, 518-537.
Loftus, E. F., & Pickrell, J. E. (1995). The formation of false memories. Psychiatric Annals, 25, 720-725.
Wade, K. A., Garry, M., Read, J. D., & Lindsay, D. S. (2002). A picture is worth a thousand lies: using false photographs to create false childhood memories, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 9(3), 597-603.
Labels: Memory
12 comments
Neither of the types of cases you provide deal with the primary contentious issue -- therapists (unintentionally one presumes) implanting memories in their patients.
Are there any studies that have looked at this context specifically?
T Skid C, none that I'm aware of but the studies I describe here are pretty good evidence it's possible. How much it actually happens is open for debate.
By the way, Jeremy, I am really enjoying your blog. Glad I discovered it.
Thanks!
An excellent post.
I've really enjoyed your series on psychological issues that impact the law.
I've linked your article on eyewitness identification several times.
Your RSS feed is on my Bookmark toolbar, and I check it religiously.
This is very interesting in light of recent events i.e. th trial of the 9/11 bombers who were held @ Guantanamo bay. No wonder people are ruling out a fair trial, the suggestability that you highlight here; along with the probability that they were held under solitary confinement and all that is associated with that and not to mention that the authorities have admitted "water torture" how could they possibly stand trial now? In an intelligent society we must assume anything they said can not be used as evidence now. Do you agree.
PS loved the schopenhaur & I'm now a recruit
I often joke about how parents could save money by doctoring pictures of their kids and making it look like they've been to Disneyland, had a pony, etc.
Then, when their kids are old enough to ask to go to Disneyland, they can hand them the pictures and say, "But we've already done that."
Before reading your article I never figured this might actually work.
Hmmm...
My son is almost 16 and is looking at cars.
Maybe I'll create a picture of him beside a wrecked sports car so when he asks for one I can hand him the picture and say, "Not after what you did to your last one."
It's worth a shot, right? ;)
Great article, Jeremy.
Another name worthy of adding to the list of investigators is the late Nick Spanos of Carleton University in Ottawa. When I last corresponded with him (c.1990) he was successfully implanting memories of alien abductions and other really weird things. Nick said the first step was just to get them to the point where "they can believe that it might be plausible" and from there it was easy. I also talked to one of his experimental subjects, an actor by profession, and he told me how, from his professional point of view, he didn't really think he had a true "past life regression" but that he'd had the same sensation he normally gets "when I really get into a role".
Very interesting article. Also an interesting comment about actors, mrG. This, along with research that shows that people with memory problems also have trouble picturing future events (see, for example, http://scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/2007/07/reconstructive_memoryconfabula.php toward the end), makes me wonder that imagining, pretending, and remembering are all interrelated. It would appear that memory is not so much a recollection of events as a re-living or re-imagining of a scenario, and that we further incorporate knowledge from other sources when recreating those scenes, as demonstrated in this and the eyewitness post earlier.
It makes me wonder if actors who really do "get into" their roles ever remember staged events as real! It also makes me think that we often "choose to pretend" but I wonder what things we pretend without choosing to. Perhaps this is where cognitive dissonance comes into play?
I myself have had the experience of dreaming something and later remembering it as an actual event. Strange stuff! Good thing it wasn't relevant in a courtroom.
Memories...what I find strange...(myself included)...is how we take so much stock in them...that the Reality brought by our memories actually happened or is truthful. From simple memories that are just wrong...like the type of carpet in my basement...to whether false memories have been implanted in a family member by a therapist...
I have a friend where we did a lot of stuff together...and shared a lot of the same stories...I remember him telling a story to a mutual friend of an event that he did...The funny thing was that he was never at the event...It was my story...and he had heard it so many times from me that he had created memories of it...
P.S. I love this blog...
Great blog! A question re: the mall study. You said, “Of the 24 participants, 7 falsely recalled the made up 'lost in the mall' event as a real memory.”
Shouldn’t that be 5 participants, or maybe you're trying to implant a false memory? :-)
On page 723 of Loftus and Pickrell (1995) it says, “At the end of the second session, subjects were debriefed and asked to choose which event may have been the false one. Of the 24 total, 19 subjects correctly chose the getting-lost memory as the false one, while the remaining five incorrectly thought that one of the true events as the false one.
Murphy, you're right, thanks - I've edited it.