Ceci, S.J. & Bronk. M. (1993). Suggestibility of the child witness: A historical review and synthesis. Psychological Bulletin, 113, 403-439.
Lindsay, D.S., Hagen, L., Read, J.D., Wade, K.A., & Garry, M. (2004). True photographs and false memory. Psychological Science, 15, 149-154.
Belli, R., & Loftus, E. (1996). The pliability of autobiographical memory: Misinformation and the false memory problem. In: D.C. Rubin (ed.) Remembering our Past: Studies in Autobiographical Memory. (pp. 157-179). New York: Cambridge University Press.
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The theory behind cuing false memories is of substantial import for not only witness testimonies, but therapy, psychiatry and every day life. The necessity of correctly assessing the power of suggestibility is crucial when asking questions to prod a witness, a patient or a friend telling a story. A good story will be positively socially reinforced and ensue its telling over time. The story may very well be altered slightly each time eliciting an entirely new, perhaps false story by the third, fifth or tenth telling. But this is not the false memory of which Lindsay et al (2004) and Ceci et al (1993) speak.
In the case of the “Wee Care Nursery School” where a Kelly Michaels was accused of sexually assaulting and taunting many young children in her classroom, the evidence was based on the stories of the children. While it would be an incredible coincidence for the 115 counts of abuse against 20 particular children to be entirely false, I cannot help but question the interrogation which followed the very first report. Informing children that “It’s okay to tell…You’ll feel better once you tell” as suggested in the article and prodding along those lines to me would begin to bias children, who may be sensing the direction in which their answers are supposed to take them.
While there is much evidence for the possibility of conjuring up false memories given the right cues, the “fault” seems to lie less with the witness or victim but with the prosecutor or questioner. It is the questions which prompt the answers after all and the suggestibility does not ensue spontaneously (on most accounts). The experiments, which all vary so much that it is difficult to truly form a consensus, all seem to agree at least on the idea that suggestibility is a real phenomenon which may taint evidence expressively after the witness has had to divulge the same information in so many different venues that there can remain no consistency.
An idea I found particularly interesting touched upon personal narrative scripts. “Along the same lines, adults are more likely than young children to assume that on meeting someone, they are to shake the person’s hand because doing so is part of their script for new encounters” (Goodman & Reed, 1986). It may not be that a certain population is entirely more “susceptible” to deviation, but instead that certain events call for a certain repertoire of experience which may affect a certain population over another. “Was the hunter’s fishing pole broken by a bear?’ (in reality, the hunter did not have a fishing pole but a spear), may be more easily integrated into a college student’s “hunting” script than a first grader’s, thus leading adults to integrate the misinformation with the original information more readily than younger children.”
Lastly, in the Belli & Loftus study, one particularly salient point stood out about memories. “Chandler (1989) and Johnson and Lindsay (1986) suggest that memories are not aptly represented by a single distribution of strength, but are better considered as multidimensional, with any particular memory consisting of a number of features…Misinformation, then, may weaken only some of these features.” Of all the articles on misrepresentation of memory, this one seems most plausible. Just as an entire stressful memory can hardly be repressed, perhaps certain aspects become more or less prominent and these components are what become these new false memories. Just a theory.
One of the most alarming outcomes of the experiments carried out about memory distortion was the experiment which convinced 50% of the subjects that they had been on a hot air balloon when they were young, when in actuality they had never been on one. The authors suggest that this might be because the subjects saw pictures of themselves in hot air balloons and this provided some sort of legitimacy to the event. It was interesting then, to see that children are more suggestible than adults. This makes perfect sense, considering our memory is best only at the age of 25, but it is intriguing to know that even as one grows older, our memories can still be manipulated.
Ceci and Bruck’s experiments focussed on children and how suggestible they are and put this in the context of children as witnesses. One of the experiments suggested that when children were asked a question more than once their answers changed as they might have thought they had given the incorrect answer the first time. This has a lot to do, I suppose, with the way in which children perceive adults. “Children perceive adults as being cooperative conversationalists who ask honest and logical questions that must have an answer”. (419) This suggests that even when the question being asked has no answer, a child will attempt to answer it. Does this mean that if children perceived adults differently, perhaps with less trust, they would not be as suggestible?
Another experiment showed that 5 of 15 children incorrectly agreed with the interviewer in a case of sexual abuse. While these results might be accurate, I was curious as to how these experiments are not problematic. In the case of this experiment about the sexual abuse, the authors suggest that it is possible for children to create memories where there were none before. But now the children have a memory of something, quite traumatic, that never actually happened. There is no information provided about what happens after the experiment has taken place. I am sure this is all legal, but wanted to know how the experimenters convinced the children it was just an experiment and the event had not actually taken place.
Child Suggestibility
The authors seem to support the position that children are suggestible, but they bring up a very good point in the end: "Therefore, the question ought not to be whether children are suggestible but whether their level of suggestibility is so much greater than that of an adult..." That was a question I had while reading the article. The article is completely about whether or not children are impressionable, but nobody seems to ask whether or not adults are suggestible as well. Personally I think children are suggestible. There are many memories from my childhood that I can only remember parts of, and there are memories that seem to exist only from my parents telling the story over and over again. When you are little it's easy to be swayed by an older figure of authority. The article says, "Eventually everything that is imagined becomes real (i.e., the child fails to differentiate fantasy from reality). I can certainly see this being true. The article also states, "Four- to ten-year-olds witnessed a staged event of a stranger who stole a book and were asked to keep the theft a secret. When the owner of the book asked the children whether they had seen who took it, 82% either delayed reporting the theft or never reported it. The most common reason given by the children for not disclosing was to honor the stranger's secret and to avoid getting him into trouble." And when children are privy to an illegal act, it is very common for the criminal to threaten the children.
I think it is unavoidable that children be used as witnesses but that there need to be specially trained interviewers to handle the children. The studies show that young children are susceptible to lying if leading questions are posed to them, so lawyers for both the prosecution and defense should only be allowed to observe, not take part in the questioning.
In the three articles, there are many different ways on which a person may be able to distort their memory or create false memories through suggestibility. In Belli’s article, the most prominent example is about identifying objects during the incident, suggested objects after the incident, and objects that were not suggested at all. In Lindsay’s article, photographs, along with a false narrative, helped create false memories after repeated readings. In Ceci’s article, children were tested for creating false testimonies through leading questions and the tone of the interviewer’s voice.
I am curious though, how people are able to mistake simple things, such as signs, soda bottles, wrenches, (Belli) and more complicated things such as child abuse, (Lindsay) to a collective memory that results in many people convicting a man for crimes that he did not commit. That was an example in an earlier reading where many people convicted a man for war crimes in WWII, although it was believed by some people that the witnesses to the crimes convicted the wrong man. Is it through interference, conversation, or photographic evidence (or a combination of all three) that all of those people were able to misidentify the man? Not only did they misidentify the war criminal, but they all identified the same man from a series of photographs. How is it possible, that after so many years after the crimes were done were these people able to misidentify the same man?
The Lindsay article suggested that old photos might cue long forgotten memories, thus resulting in “repressed” memories to be retrieved. This seems reasonable, but it leaves room for false memories to be made. I think this makes a lot of sense, because pictures bring back a lot of memories you may have completely forgotten. At the same time, if you have been told to look at a family album because you show some characteristic of having been abused, I feel you are more likely to over analyze certain situations, since you are expecting to find some type of memory, which will lead to the remembrance of a traumatizing experience. The Belli and Loftus article brought up the validity of eyewitness reports. These reports are easily changed because witnesses have usually been exposed to a lot of talk about an event and therefore, unintentionally change what they remembered. Because of the misinformation effect, I wonder if eyewitness reports are really helpful or harmful. Although they can help a great deal, I feel like if an eyewitness is misinformed and tells their report, believing it is completely accurate, they can throw off the direction of certain cases. This article also brought up false memories of childhood abuse in adults. I think people who are able to visually recall false memories may have been exposed to someone else’s false memory. Usually, when someone describes something to you, you picture it visually in your mind. Though this did not happen to you, the visual image is in your mind, and may be accidentally triggered as a memory of yours especially if someone is hinting at or asking you to recall a memory close to this particular memory. Dreams also result in many false memories since dreams seem so real at times and reflect daily activities or things you were exposed to during the day, thus resulting in tremendous difficulty sometimes when trying to differentiate between reality and dreams. This article also brings up people who have been abused, but because it is hard to accurately determine these memories it is often hard to tell whether someone has been abused or is just victim of a false memory. Because of this, actual abuse victims may have difficulty in getting help. I wonder, though, if false memories can result in an actual abuse victim forgetting they were abused and result in the victim believing it either never happened or was just a dream.
Lindsay's article talks about the ability of pseudoevents to create false memories.
What I found interesting was the ability of photographs to generate memories from before, regardless of it being false or genuine. The example of a childhood image of the subject inserted into the basket of a hot air balloon even though the subject had not experienced it before was able to create false memories. It is then said that people perceive photographs as evidence that the particualar event really occured. Besides, I also think that the subject might have this false memory because he/she was told to about hot air balloons and imagines himself in one. Therefore, when the subject saw himself in the photograph, he had the memory he imagined and mistook it for being real.
The slime experiment elaborated the previous example. The statistical data showed that those who were given photos had higher mean ratings of their memory experiences. Their memories were divided into three parts which were no images or memories, images but not memories and memories of putting slime in the teachers desk. The ratings of memories of the pseudoevent by subjects as having false memories were equivalent to the ratings of memories of the true events which meant the the false memories were as compelling as memories of the true evens. Besides, those reporting images but not memories were similar to ratings of those who had not memories or images than those who had memories. Also, the subjects correctly identified which was the pseudoevent because they had a hard time remembering the event and had to work to remember it. I found that rather vague as when I look upon my life, I have to work to remember some memories when I look at my old photographs.
In my opinion, false memories can be created by things people tell us and things we imagined to be true. However, let's say a kid has an imaginary friend called Bob. If the kid grows up, will he look as Bob as an imaginary friend he had or will he believe that he really had a friend called Bob?
As stated by Rubin, misinformation can either alter or make less accessible the original memory representation of the event. Misinformation obviously affects memory and therefore we are capable of unintentionally making false reports as an eyewitness of an event or of unintentionally remembering something falsely because we are presented with some other suggestive influences, causing us to recall these false memories. As in the article True Photographs and False Memories, the researchers examined the effect of using photographs in triggering false or true memories with the incorporation of suggestive influences. Photos seem to have a very dramatic effect on triggering memories, even if they are false. They cause one to think of all the possible situations that could have taken place during that specific instance, and if one doesn’t really remember what actually happened when the picture was taken, the photo causes one to speculate on what could have happened, not recognizing if the memory recall is true or false. In this study, undergraduates were asked to remember three school-related childhood events, half of them were given their school classes’ group photos from the years of the recalled events as memory cues. And what I find very interesting is that the rate of false memory reports was substantially higher in the photo condition than in the no-photo condition. It seems that people believe that photos are evidence that the depicted event really did occur and provide a source of information in terms of the details of the suggested events. Therefore seeing childhood photos definitely contributes to the formation of false memories, and this is because childhood photos provide a source of very vivid images that combined with fragments of imagination can create incredibly false memories. When I look back at old photos from my childhood, I find myself thinking about what could have taken place then and what I was doing, and they are probably never true. I hadn’t thought about this before, but even if I’m not saying what memories I’m recalling out loud, I’m still recalling false memories.
I was very compelled by the article Suggestibility of the Child Witness: A Historical Review and Synthesis. The article deals with the concepts of whether or not a child witness is reliable. The research deals with to what extent increased levels of suggestibility may affect children’s ability to accurately report what they have witnessed. Children are increasingly being called to testify in court, specifically in sexual abuse cases. This research deals with cases in which children have been sexually abused and how they have recalled what has happened to them. On the one hand children are very unlikely to lie because they really have no reason to and are honest most of the time about acts that have been carried out on their bodies. However on the other hand, children have difficulty distinguishing from the real world and the fantasy world and therefore can be less reliable than adults. How can one ever know how accurate a child’s recollection of an event really is, how honest they really are and the extent to which they have difficulty differentiating between reality and fantasy? A child’s encoding, storage, retrieval and reporting of events can be influenced by a variety of social and psychological factors. The whole issue of testimony of child witnesses has gained much skepticism over the years and is still a challenging field, therefore I wonder in the wee care nursery case and the country walk babysitting service, how much of the children’s accounts of what happened were influenced by other factors such as the perpetrators themselves?
Stephen J. Ceci and Maggie Bruck’s Suggestibility of the Child Witness: A Historical Review and Synthesis and D. Stephen Lindsay, Lisa Hagen, J. Don Read, Kimberly A. Wade and Maryanne Garry’s True Photographs and False Memories discuss the suggestibility of young children and adults to assess the reliability of child recall and testimony and the formation of “pseudo-memories.” The study conducted by Lindsay et al. explores the validity of childhood recollections resulting from photograph-cues which, combined with suggestive effects, can trigger the development of or the belief in memories which did not occur. Although reviewing childhood photos may benefit the retrieval of forgotten memories, there has been heightened controversy over the therapeutic benefits, or rather detrimental effects, of this method in that combined with suggestive forces, such as a false narrative or repeated probing, belief in a certain event and the motivation to recollect that event, photographs provide vivid images that, when incorporated with imagination, may lead an individual to develop false memories. In a prior study discussed by Lindsay et al. individuals were given a photo allegedly taken during their childhood in which they were on a hot air balloon and in which they had been edited in using a computer. Unknowledgeable about the manipulation and compelled by the hard evidence that the event had occurred, half of the individuals verbally recalled erroneous memories of the event depicted in the photograph. However interesting it may personally be that photographs, combined with other elements, possess the ability to manipulate and distort one’s memories, thus distorting one’s entire identity, I found it not at all surprising that given a photograph of oneself, even if fabricated, individuals believe that the event actually took place simply because a photograph is most often considered as truthful evidence that something happened.
Focusing on children, Ceci et al. explores the cognitive and social factors that are at the base of suggestibility. It is interesting to note that in the case of the Wee Care Nursery School, in which Margaret Kelly Michaels, a nursery school teacher, was accused and convicted of 115 counts of sexual abuse against twenty of her three to five year old students, most of the children interviewed by detectives before they had admitted to being sexually abused were told their classmates had already admitted to being hurt by their teacher who was a “bad person” (Ceci et al. 1993). Not only were these children young and vulnerable, but susceptible to the accusation toned environment created during the interrogation, probably somewhat fearful, and prone to adherence to authority figures such as the interrogators. Throughout reading this article I couldn’t help but think that falsified recollections in young children is due more to the nature and tone of the questions being asked than children simply lying. Questioned in an unfamiliar environment by unfamiliar people in a manner that implies or misleads in a condescending tone, or otherwise said an intense situation for a young child, “children appear to easily give up these (fantasy-reality) distinctions” (Ceci et al. 1993), thus leading them to comply with authority figures and sometimes give a false statement. Although there is much skepticism about the credibility of child recollections and the testimony of such recollections in court, I feel it imperative that further research be done to determine which methods must be used in interrogations and the judicial system to cue the retrieval of accurate memories in children. Not only is further research necessary to assure that truth is revealed and justice served in court, but also to ensure that children’s rights are protected and their voices, often overlooked, be heard.
The power of suggestibility…
No one keeps all their memories at a given moment in the forefront of their mind. If we are not aware of a particular memory in our minds at any given moment then it is very easy for someone to suggest a false one to us. For example if a familiar person to me like a family member or long time friend tells me: “Remember that time when we skinny dipped at Lake blah blah blah…” I might trust their memory over my own. Then I would incorporate a false memory into my life scripts. This is far worse for a child to experience. They are easier corrupted and more trained to cooperate with their elders. It is important to take into account the fact that our memories are not straightforward or one-dimensional. Certain aspects of our memories are more prominent then others. When one aspect becomes more prominent due to the suggestion of an outside party this can create a subtle false memory. In one of the studies for this week when the children were asked a question more than once their answers changed because they thought they had given incorrect answers the first time. This is an important factor to notice. Parents and other influential pillars in a child’s life are constantly correcting or prompting the child. For instance:
“What did you eat for lunch today Tommy?”
“Um, a peanut butter and jelly sandwhich.”
“No, what did you eat for lunch?” (condescending tone)
“Oh, I ate a ham sandwich. Thanks Mom.”
We are trained from a young age to please our superiors whether it be the principle of our school when we are in trouble or even a friend using peer-pressure tactics:
“We are drinkin tonight my friend.” (puts arm around friend as walking out of class at age anywhere between 16 and 22).
“I gotta study for this frigin test man.”
“No, you said yesterday that we would be drinkin tonight! Tequila!”
“Oh, well then we are so totally getting drunk!”
Of course these examples are worse when applied to other more harmful situations:
“Now explain to the court, did this man touch you in your private place?”
“No.”
“It’s okay. Nothing bad will happen. Just tell us the truth. It will feel so much better. Did this man touch you in your private place?”
“I guess so.”
The child is made to feel that they were wrong as if they marked a instead of d (none of the above) on a test.
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