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- Title
Self‐relevance enhances susceptibility to false memory.
- Authors
Wang, Jianqin; Wang, Bihan; Otgaar, Henry; Patihis, Lawrence; Sauerland, Melanie
- Abstract
Eyewitness testimony serves as important evidence in the legal system. Eyewitnesses of a crime can be either the victims themselves—for whom the experience is highly self‐referential—or can be bystanders who witness and thus encode the crime in relation to others. There is a gap in past research investigating whether processing information in relation to oneself versus others would later impact people's suggestibility to misleading information. In two experiments (Ns = 68 and 122) with Dutch and Chinese samples, we assessed whether self‐reference of a crime event (i.e., victim vs. bystander) affected their susceptibility to false memory creation. Using a misinformation procedure, we photoshopped half of the participants' photographs into a crime slideshow so that they saw themselves as victims of a nonviolent crime, while others watched the slideshow as mock bystander witnesses. In both experiments, participants displayed a self‐enhanced suggestibility effect: Participants who viewed themselves as victims created more false memories after receiving misinformation than those who witnessed the same crime as bystanders. These findings suggest that self‐reference might constitute a hitherto new risk factor in the formation of false memories when evaluating eyewitness memory reports.
- Subjects
FALSE memory syndrome; COMMON misconceptions; JUSTICE administration; LEGAL testimony; CRIME
- Publication
Behavioral Sciences & the Law, 2024, Vol 42, Issue 2, p79
- ISSN
0735-3936
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1002/bsl.2644