“Yes it was me”. We have seen it in the movies: a suspect is harassed by the police until he confesses to a crime he did not commit.
But, as a team of psychologists has shown in a study echoed by the journal Psychological Science , there is no need to push that way to make it happen: anyone can fabricate false memories of having committed a crime after a cleverly directed talk. .
The researchers achieved this with the following method . After identifying 60 college students with no criminal records, they contacted their dependents when they were between 11 and 14 years old to gather details about their lives at the time. They then held three 45-minute interviews with the students in which they mixed real data from their past with false criminal acts.
The result was surprising: of the 30 participants who were induced criminal pseudo-memories, 21 (ie 71%) were convinced that they really were “guilty” , and provided specific details of the event. 11 of them even vividly remembered committing an assault with weapons. The rest of the volunteers were led to believe that they had suffered some personal setback (such as an accident, a dog attack or a loss of money) with similar results: 76.7% “swallowed it”.
Experts hope that their study will be taken into account not only by police officers, judges or lawyers who intervene in criminal cases, but also by therapists and other professionals whose work is based on conducting interviews.
