Think Your Memory is Good? You Can Be Convinced You Committed A Felony Crime You Did Not Commit

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How fickle is our memory?

Give an interrogation team three hours using friendly means, and they can convince you that you committed a crime you didn't commit.

If the team uses some true information from your past (like names of friends, places you visited), encourages you to try to remember the crime incident when you say you don't, and uses a few suggestive memory retrieval strategies (e.g., "Do you remember buying the gun?"), you are likely to end up believing you committed a crime as serious as assault with a weapon.

The interrogation team can get you to provide vivid details of the assault and even to act it out, even though it is completely false.

reference: Shaw, J., and Porter, S. (2015). Constructing rich false memories of committing crime. Psychological Science, 26(3).