People can be convinced they committed a crime that never happened (2015)

https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/people-can-be-convinced-they-committed-a-crime-they-dont-remember.html

by Quinzel • 3 years ago

320 193 3 years ago

psychologicalscience.org

joelegner• 3 years ago

Simone wielding AI nefariously will eventually use this tidbit about human nature to terrible effect.

Quinzel• 3 years ago

What a terrifying thought that is.

xattt• 3 years ago

We’ve got to stop Simone!

madaxe_again2• 3 years ago

AI is not necessary to make your population believe the Big Lie - in fact, by applying a consistent false narrative to an entire group, you get reinforcement effects by more impressionable members of the group towards those with a greater resistance.

This has been used, repeatedly, through history.

Now, where AI could be applied would be in having a tailored, sculpted false narrative for each and every subject, which could be used for mass sentiment manipulation - profile each target, determine the ideal narrative to achieve the desired emotional and behavioural outcome, implant, rinse and repeat.

Could be used for nefarious purposes, could be used for benign purposes - although it’s hard to see anything that involves the mass brainwashing of a population as benign. Perhaps it would be useful for deprogramming - undoing the effects of the currently prevalent methods where desirable, such as indoctrinated cult members, dictator worshippers, and religious zealots - but right there in my postulating you see scope creep, and that’s why it’s almost inevitable this will end up being applied for marketing and programming purposes.

Remember when you first fell in love with Morbo brand human kibble? We do.

localplume• 3 years ago

You touched on a disturbing point. People like to imagine that some govt will wield to indoctrinate the populace, but it is more likely this kind of tool would be used for marketing or advertisement. look at how many people gladly work for FANG/whatever companies and develop tools just to supercharge advertisement but see no moral issues with it. as long as they're making money, and a lot of money, who cares right?

I mean advertisements already are basically brainwashing right? quirky jingles or catch phrases associated with some food or product, that stick in your head.

interestica• 3 years ago

Can’t tell if typo, or if speaking about relevant film (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_(2002_film))

Jagerbizzle• 3 years ago

Starring one of my favorite actors, AI Pacino

dontupvoteme2• 3 years ago

"The AI" itself will. Along with blackmail. Probably the worst thing (if this comes to pass) Humans ever did was make a generation think they'll make shiny skeleton robots wielding guns with red eyes instead of sit in the shadows of a datacenter combining n-grams into weapons

fisot• 3 years ago

~70+ %

I wonder if this is an inherent brain bias thing, leaving some more susceptible than others.

kbrkbr2• 3 years ago

- 2x30 participants - Not chosen at random - No double blinding - Plenty of leeway for influence by conductors of experiment

I'm not convinced these results can be generalized into more than: some researchers could trick 60 handpicked students into seemingly believing a false memory for a short period of time. Let's wait if this is reproducible.

krisoft2• 3 years ago

I don’t understand your argument. “People Can Be Convinced They Committed a Crime That Never Happened” The test subject were people, they got convinced.

They are not claiming that everyone under every circumstance can be convinced they commited any crime.

Even if it can only happen sometimes to some people under some circumstances that would be of great importance to the process of justice.

kbrkbr2• 3 years ago

You are right. I indeed thought only probabilities would matter here, when it is possibilities.

chmaynard• 3 years ago

I don't need convincing. When something bad happens, I always feel responsible.

tacocataco3• 3 years ago

Couldn't find what I was looking for in a store? Better walk out feeling like I took money out of the cash register.

ekianjo• 3 years ago

Evidence from some wrongful-conviction cases suggests that suspects can be questioned in ways that lead them to falsely believe in and confess to committing crimes they didn’t actually commit.

It's been known for like dozens of years at least. What happened in soviet Russia and in China during the cultural revolution was all about making people convinced that they had committed crimes and that they deserved their punishment, and it worked very well.

emodendroket9• 3 years ago

Unfortunately you do not have to look to the past or the other side of the globe to find an epidemic of false confessions.

0xcde4c3db• 3 years ago

Indeed. Probably the dirtiest open secret of the US criminal justice system is that it is structurally incapable of giving a truly fair trial to the vast majority of the accused. The system would grind to a halt without the vast majority of cases ending in plea bargains, and we have pretty good reasons to suspect that common police interrogation tactics (often functionally indistinguishable from psychological abuse) tend to produce false confessions [1] [2].

[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/02/22/1158356619/plea-bargains-crim...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/29/opinion/false-confessions...

splendor_spoon5• 3 years ago

What does this peppering of whataboutism add to the conversation?

moffkalast• 3 years ago

Or you know, it being the standard work process for police these days apparently, so they can pat themselves on the back and go home early: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obCNQ0xksZ4

nonameiguess• 3 years ago

This was published 8 years ago. Makes me wonder if it's replicated yet or if anyone has tried.

I certainly am no fan of the reliability of human memory. It surprises me that more people aren't skeptical just from their own experiences. So many times I've told stories of things I did or remember from when I was young, especially to my wife, only to eventually visit my parents and find out I'm wrong and that never happened.

And, of course, among my earlier memories are from kindergarten. I remember seeing the Challenger explosion happen in class and I remember missing half the year because of pneumonia. They can't possibly both be true because they'd have happened at the same time, but I remember both nonetheless. Is my memory of watching the OJ verdict live in high school history class also false? I have no idea, but I wouldn't be the least bit surprised. I have no idea how much of my remembered life actually happened without independent corroboration.

It leads to such conflicted feelings when the subject comes up of people remembering childhood abuse they'd "suppressed." No doubt many more children are abused than remember and many, if not most, abusers never come to justice. But also no doubt many of these memories, like the entirety of the Satanic Panic, never happened, and many people are in prison or registered for life unable to get a regular job, who never did anything.

It's worth remembering this as we see the development in real time of LLMs and other somewhat intelligent tools that are able to just make shit up and seem totally confident about it. They're not the only ones that hallucinate. All prediction and recall systems that are inherently probabilistic but need to tell only one story are likely to be susceptible to this kind of thing, including any and every AI we will ever develop, including ourselves. Claims need to have evidence and be independently verifiable or you shouldn't trust them. Even your own claims.

Aerroon2• 3 years ago

I wonder if this is why people can become angry and aggressive when you accuse them of something. That would provide a natural defense against this kind of suggestibility.

It obviously wouldn't work with the modern police, because they would overpower you, but a few thousand years ago? I think it could've worked.

cplusplusfellow• 3 years ago

I can hear the police response now. “Why are you so angry about me accusing you of committing such a heinous crime that may even bear the death penalty if you didn’t do it?”

Aerroon2• 3 years ago

"Because it's insulting that you think so lowly of me!"

tacocataco3• 3 years ago

"Stop resisting" as they do whatever they want to you.

Clubber• 3 years ago

It obviously wouldn't work with the modern police, because they would overpower you

Never go into a police interrogation without a lawyer regardless of innocence or guilt. That's our only counter today.

j16sdiz• 3 years ago

Only if you can get a lawyer.

In many parts of the world, you can't.

Timon318• 3 years ago

Thinking about anger as a defense makes a lot of sense to me. The cost to the individual whose opinion might be changed is pretty big: you will have to re-evaluate any thoughts that branches off the thought that is being challenged, so it might have a cascading effect. There needs to either be some natural stopping points (i.e. the thought graph is acyclic), or some other mechanism must keep us from going in circles.

not_alexb• 3 years ago

Not convincing in the general sense at least; I get high on learning new things that change my perspective entirely -- and that doesn't seem to be uncommon

stubish• 3 years ago

I think this is the mind defending its worldview, in the same way as people react when you question or present evidence that contradicts. And yes, it is a natural defense against changing your mind and can be rationalized as a survival strategy (my worldview has kept me alive and healthy so far, and adjusting it is increasing risk).

yosito• 3 years ago

The fact that the students appeared to internalize the false events to the extent that they did highlights the fundamental malleability of memory

This seems like a bit of a leap to assume that this is about malleability rather than just lying to researchers and saying what they feel is expected. I could very easily imagine myself playing along with someone trying to convince me of false memories just because I don't want to put up a fight against someone who is gaslighting me.

Speaking of which, how is gaslighting students considered ethical research?

emodendroket9• 3 years ago

Well this is just the latest of many studies suggesting memory is extremely malleable and suggestible.

canjobear5• 3 years ago

If the studies are based on asking people if they remember the false event, they are susceptible to the same critique.

FrustratedMonky6• 3 years ago

Strong bias on HN about replication. But the ability to implant false memories has been widely researched and replicated. This isn't a stretch. Memory is very fallible.

ackbar03• 3 years ago

Exactly. Leonardo Dicaprio did it

Timon318• 3 years ago

How would you propose we differentiate between students "playing along" and students really having false memories? Couldn't I discard any psychological study by saying "well, the participants could have faked it", since it's by definition not falsifiable (any test could also be faked)?

canjobear5• 3 years ago

You should indeed be extremely skeptical of studies whose only dependent variable is a voluntary participant response and where the participant has an incentive to tell the experimenter what they think they want to hear (for example, to make the experiment end faster).

somenameforme3• 3 years ago

Yes, you could discard any study under that rationale among others. And the interesting thing is you'd likely be far more 'informed' for doing so. Social psychology has the lowest replication rate of any field. You're looking at top journals with replication rates in the twenties. [1]

What this means is that if you were to take any give study in social psychology, and simply assume it was 'wrong' (either saying the opposite of the truth, or claiming a statistically significant effect when there really is none), then you'd, on average, be dramatically more 'informed' than somebody taking the studies at face value. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#In_psycholo...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoscience

anonymouskimmer8• 3 years ago

How would you propose we differentiate between students "playing along" and students really having false memories?

Remove the incentive for the student to fabulate.

Have another, supposedly (to the students) 'independent' researcher ask them questions about it days or weeks later. A potential way of doing this would be to have a member of the Institutional Review Board (or supposed member of said board) following up with the students as a matter of 'quality control' and verification that the study followed IRB guidelines. Phrase the reason for the questioning as looking for non-punitive, but developmental, feedback for the researcher.

For ethical reasons this would probably require blinding the original researcher to the identities of the students, but this could be done by having people other than the PI actually ask the questions.

For a particular study on whether or not the student did something criminal, have the questioner truthfully assert to the student binding confidentiality as to their identity by dint of being a psychologist or someone like that who has the legal duty to not divulge.

iudqnolq• 3 years ago

I'm sure many of us have experienced the effect where you're having an argument with someone where it doesn't really matter and the other person agrees with you to shut you up.

FrustratedMonky6• 3 years ago

It is impossible to discuss Psychology on HN. I think STEM type personalities are incapable of fathoming that the mind can be studied. I tend to think that the STEM personality has a lower than average ability for self-reflection, and thus they still think the mind is a mysterious phenomena that is beyond science. They aren't able to observe their own minds, and thus think it is impossible for anybody else to either.

andrewflnr4• 3 years ago

Uh, no, HN is perennially fascinated with the mind, and grabs up any verifiable bits of information it can. That's why we've been exposed to all the myriad ways the mind is genuinely hard to study. We've seen the rise and fall of lots of studies, some plausible, some not, and we're tired of being conned on something important to us.

frogger8• 3 years ago

So many devs like me have wrote, approved and even committed code that we eventually convinced ourselves was correct.

pizzafeelsright• 3 years ago

Without a git log and belief my keys are secured, I've read code I've written that I would never have believed I could have written, both good and bad.

Memory is a fabrication. Scars are real. Wounds have stories.

Garvi• 3 years ago

I believe if a concentrated effort was made on social media to censor all talk of "round earth theories" (the exception being posts that are sufficiently dogpiled and ridiculed, to be made example of), creating a fake display of global unified flat earth thinking; given only a few months, 99% would turn flat-earthers. I also believe the only reason this has not happened yet is because there isn't any real profit in doing it. Social media is an incredibly powerful tool for manipulating people by displaying a fake image of them being alone in their way of thinking and in need of readjustment or risk ostracization. Ironically I couldn't explain on a better example, as mentioning cases closer to reality would just get this post censored. And I'm not talking about vaccines, gender or race theory. And if you can't immediately think of 20 things you're just not allowed to say on any platform, you're just not thinking anymore.

kenjackson4• 3 years ago

I think most scientific theories, if given false data and evidence, would no longer be believed. That’s just because most people have very little direct evidence of the root of most phenomena. This seems very different than convincing me that I committed a crime that I didn’t.

DrDroop• 3 years ago

I remember reading a story on here about the two daughters of the founder of the false memory institute who served as expert widnes for the defence of multiple sexual abuse cases accusing their father of incest himself and having invented this false memory thing as a psychological cope.

Maybe it was this one https://www.thecut.com/article/false-memory-syndrome-controv...

kneebonian• 3 years ago

The researchers identified a total of 60 students who had not been involved in any of the crimes designated as false memory targets in the study and who otherwise met the study criteria. These students were brought to the lab for three 40-minute interviews that took place about a week apart.

Psychology is the study of 18-25 year old undergrads.

tomohawk• 3 years ago

This is one of many reasons why you should never talk to police. There's nothing you can say that will better your position, and almost anything you do say will hurt your position. Famous video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE&pp=ygUUZG9uJ3Qgd...

dontupvoteme2• 3 years ago

Just hope that you're not in a jurisdiction in which silence can be used against you (such as the UK)

sonorous_sub• 3 years ago

RIP Uncle Ted

037• 3 years ago

Do you remember the movie Under Suspicion (2000)[1], starring Gene Hackman? Can’t say too much without spoilers, but it’s related.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_Suspicion_(2000_film)

jbavari• 3 years ago

Interesting that the entire article had nothing to mention about the Reid technique [1]. The Reid technique has been used by law enforcement to convince criminals of confessions. Many confessions were found to be false. In the book by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson [2], they cover false confessions in depth with a few court cases, as well as police techniques to invoke cognitive dissonance in the accused. Callout to the book though, for self-deception and cognitive dissonance is something that affects us all!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reid_technique [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistakes_Were_Made_(but_Not_by...

antisthenes• 3 years ago

I took a cursory look through the Reid technique.

It's literally just modern gaslighting.

swayvil2• 3 years ago

Well, it's a highly developed and systematized form of gaslighting. A significant technological advancement over the common amateur gaslighting.

Like the machinegun isn't just another musket.

Consider the progress of technology in the field of lying, bullshit and propaganda.

We've been developing that stuff for literally thousands of years. It has surely been refined to such a height as to be nigh-perfectly secret, invisible and powerful.

koboll• 3 years ago

Pretty illuminating that the origin story of the technique is it eliciting what was later revealed as a false confession that sentenced an innocent man to life in prison.

sidewndr462• 3 years ago

Wouldn't that be considered evidence of techniques usefulness?

aleph_minus_one• 3 years ago

The Reid technique has been used by law enforcement to convince criminals of confessions. Many confessions were found to be false.

This is one reason among many why it is a serious question to ask whether a confession increases or actually rather decreases the likelihood that the culprit commited the crime.

mbg7213• 3 years ago

That only matters if the truth is a major consideration. Some theories of justice don't care, as long as social order is maintained.

TechBro8615• 3 years ago

If you're being interrogated by the police, you've already lost. The only word you should say is "lawyer."

Here's what the ideal interrogation looks like: https://youtube.com/watch?v=6RoKvC1qcEY

sidewndr462• 3 years ago

Specifically "I want a lawyer", not "I want a lawyer dog"

Borrible• 3 years ago

Law Enforcement has an alignment problem?

anigbrowl2• 3 years ago

(2015)

zealtrace• 3 years ago

This study was immediately critiqued for distorted results due to the way the researchers interpreted the data.

"We used three different approaches to recode their data. Using Shaw and Porter's approach, we replicated their 70%. Using alternative approaches that distinguish between false beliefs and memories, we found 26-30% of subjects met the criteria for false memories. Moreover, we showed that laypeople’s understanding of remembering better aligns with the alternative coding approaches than with Shaw and Porter’s."

http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/87062/

lisasays2• 3 years ago

Ok, so -- half full or half empty? Or are you saying it's all BS?

anonymouskimmer8• 3 years ago

Not quite as bad as expected. This means that a bit more than half of those with false beliefs probably wouldn't testify to the absolute truth of their belief in court.

Nowado• 3 years ago

Anyone interested should just Google 'Elizabeth Loftus'. She convinced people of a bunch of things that never happened, some of them very quickly. Standard example is getting people to tell stories about meeting Bugs Bunny in Disneyland, but there was also some crime stuff, I think past trauma as well.

Law enforcement has their quotas and they'll use any garbage they can to fill it, but it's kind of hilarious that people just trust their memories for important stuff they can control.

rainworld• 3 years ago

Loftus has also been involved with the cases of [Robert Durst, Ghislaine Maxwell, Harvey Weinstein, Jerry Sandusky,] Ted Bundy, O.J. Simpson, Rodney King, Oliver North, Martha Stewart, Lewis Libby, Michael Jackson, the Menéndez brothers and the Oklahoma City bombers.

Completely normal. Absolutely no reason to question her work.

She did some CIA consulting, too.

getpost2• 3 years ago

Argh! The fact that false memories can be induced does not mean that all memories are false.

Commentary: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/04/05/how-elizabeth-...

Rebuttal: https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2021/04/25/the-new-yorkers-hi...

terribleperson• 3 years ago

It does however mean that if you're trying to manipulate someone to reveal or recall something, you need to be careful that you're not just making them fabricate it.

George83728• 3 years ago

Wow, that New Yorker article really is something. She hires private investigators to obtain sealed court records about an allegation of child abuse and de-anonymized the child. Then when the university reprimands her for this and tells her to turn over the documents, she calls that an "Orwellian nightmare". Orwellian? Who's the one doing the spying, procuring documents they have no right to possess? Loftus herself was the Orwellian nightmare but she saw herself as the victim in this. Even if Loftus's hypothesis about the case is correct, she clearly caused a great deal of emotional anguish for this person but was more concerned with the university telling her to leave it alone. The whole of this article paints her as a narcissist if not a psychopath.

The whyevolutionistrue rebuttal is insubstantial, it doesn't address this at all.

NoMoreNicksLeft3• 3 years ago

The fact that false memories can be induced does not mean that all memories are false.

How is this even slightly relevant?

If some memories are false, and other memories are true, and none of us can tell which is which, then according to our principles of justice we must act as if all memories are potentially false.

"Memory as evidence" crumbles at that point.

SoftTalker• 3 years ago

There are FOUR lights!

cat_plus_plus• 3 years ago

That's why confession obtained in unrestricted police interrogation can't be the only part of justice process. There first has to be evidence to detain and interrogate someone in the first place. The suspect must be informed of the right to remain silent and consequences of saying anything, and given an option to consult with a lawyer. Judges and juries should demand that collaborating evidence is presented to show that confession confirmed aspects of the crime that were not publicly known.

If someone is well aware that they will end up in prison if they "remember" something from teenager years and that they don't have to say anything / are free to go, they will be much less likely to play along vs a student who knows they are part of a study with no real life consequences.

SamoyedFurFluff2• 3 years ago

There first has to be evidence to detain and interrogate someone in the first place.

No there isn’t. The cops can just claim you were in the are- even if you weren’t. And no, “asleep in my bed because the crime happened at 3 am” happens to not be an alibi.

Judges and juries should demand that corroborating evidence is presented to show that confession confirmed aspects of the crime that were not publicly known.

It’s actually possible to coerce someone into confessing with details not even they know of, with the police nudging them towards details of the case not publicly known. “No, you’re lying about killing him with handgun, it’s not a nicer way to kill someone’s than how you actually did it, you wanted to get up close and personal didn’t you”.

If someone is well aware that they will end up in prison if they "remember" something from teenager years and that they don't have to say anything / are free to go, they will be much less likely to play along vs a student who knows they are part of a study with no real life consequences.

Okay, but a student also isn’t being held and gaslit well into the night with no sleep, food, or water, constantly told “if you just cooperate we can help you” (a complete lie) by the cops.

NoMoreNicksLeft3• 3 years ago

If there was the political will for it, nothing about our legal system makes it impossible to prohibit admitting confessions as evidence in court. We could just say "those are never evidence, the prosecution isn't allowed to introduce them or even hint that they have occurred".

Police could still use them as a lead, to track down real evidence. If the culprit claims to have disposed of the murder weapon and they discover the weapon where he said it was, that's real evidence.

But more generally, eyewitness testimony itself (of which confessions are just a special variant of) should be inadmissible. Professionals giving professional testimony from notes and reports they have compiled should be the whole of it.

lisasays2• 3 years ago

I wonder if analogs can be found -- for example, in the way some people blame themselves for the "crime" of letting a marriage or relationship fail. Or allow themselves to be consumed by guilt when a loved one succumbs to an illness, or is lost in a horrible accident (that they feel they could have prevented, or reacted more quickly to somehow).

analog312• 3 years ago

I'm reminded of a famous case in Chicago in which a juvenile confessed to murdering his mother, and even offered many details that could only have been known to the person who committed the crime. There were calls for trying the kid as an adult, reviving the death penalty, etc.

Then it was discovered that the police had gotten their files mixed up, and the kid had actually confessed to the wrong crime.

qup• 3 years ago

Can you re-word this? It's hard to understand what you mean.

Are you saying his mother was murdered, he confessed, but they mixed up the "unknowable details" from another crime, prompted the boy into knowing those, and then he confessed the unknowable details from another murder?

It seems weird to say "he confessed to the wrong crime" given the circumstances, so I can't figure it out any other way.

pests• 3 years ago

To me it sounds like he was in custody for an unrelated case and was questioned on the murdered mother case and admitted to all those details.

Who knows though until the original poster decides to come back.

bena• 3 years ago

"Chicago" and "false confession" turns up way more hits than it should. I couldn't find a story that matched those particular details. I've found others, like one where a kid was put in prison for confessing to fatally stabbing a woman. A woman, who was choked and beaten to death, not stabbed. Not even once.

And the same cold reading techniques that allow psychics to know intimate details of your life can be done in reverse to get people to admit to details they shouldn't know. If the victim wore a red shirt. You don't ask what color shirt they were wearing, you ask if they were wearing a red shirt. If they say "I don't know", you tell them that's not good enough. They need to answer "yes" or "no". You got a 50/50 chance for them to admit it was red. And if it was pink, when they say, "I don't know", you can then say, "Would you say it was more of a pink than a red?".

Regardless, you badger, intimidate, and coerce into getting them to come to the same conclusion you did before you walked into the room. That they did it.

analog312• 3 years ago

Yes, exactly as you describe.

lancebeet• 3 years ago

This article reminds me of an episode of Derren Brown's TV show, called "The Heist"[0], where he supposedly manipulates a group of ordinary people to commit an armed robbery. Apparently, in a more recent episode called "The Guilt Trip"[1], he convinces people they have committed murder, which seems even more similar to what's described in this article. It would be interesting to read a skeptic's analysis of the phenomenon, since you're left wondering how much is caused by people acting to please the observer (the cameras in Brown's case, the experimenter in the article's case) and how much is actual planted false memories.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDtMMsFoHuY

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AzTLw0Xwok

pushcx• 3 years ago

The paper itself: https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614562862

omgomgomgomg• 3 years ago

Especially innocent people under first time interrogation. Police, prosecutors and judges know this full well. Anything for conviction rates.

I do not believe for a second you can convince any innocent person rhey have commites any serious crime unless they suffer from heavy amnesia.

kar5pt• 3 years ago

Is there a typo in here? Your first comment contradicts your second.

gweinberg2• 3 years ago

SORCERY, n. The ancient prototype and forerunner of political influence. It was, however, deemed less respectable and sometimes was punished by torture and death. Augustine Nicholas relates that a poor peasant who had been accused of sorcery was put to the torture to compel a confession. After enduring a few gentle agonies the suffering simpleton admitted his guilt, but naively asked his tormentors if it were not possible to be a sorcerer without knowing it. --Ambrose Bierce

tvbuzz• 3 years ago

Reminds me Derren Brown’s ‘The Push’. Trailer here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doFpACkiZ2Q

People can be convinced they committed a crime that never happened (2015)

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