I haven't been able to read the paper myself but it seems rather important to raise awareness about it regardless.
The “ahead of print” online paper is published by Psychological Science. It hasn't yet been published in the print magazine. There's an abstract but unfortunately the full paper is paywalled. Citing part of the abstract:
After three interviews, 70% of participants were classified as having false memories of committing a crime (theft, assault, or assault with a weapon) that led to police contact in early adolescence and volunteered a detailed false account.
The different reports have some slight differences and might include a wider study but some of it must be wrong, the following quote is from Science Daily:
Of the 30 participants who were told they had committed a crime as a teenager, 21 (71%) were classified as having developed a false memory of the crime; of the 20 who were told about an assault of some kind (with or without a weapon), 11 reported elaborate false memory details of their exact dealings with the police.
A similar proportion of students (76.67%) formed false memories of the emotional event they were told about.
The study serves as a warning of how easy or trivial it is to create entirely false complete memories either deliberately or by accident. If subjected to such manipulation then awareness about the feasibility of it seems to be the most likely defense.
According to the reporting the paper has shown that a full episodic false memory of committing a crime can be generated in a controlled experimental setting, which is said to be a first. In the study they combined information about the person, knowledge and use of the “bad” but subtle error-introducing techniques, and three forty minutes long friendly interviews each set a week apart. There probably isn't any reason to think of the amounts of time they used as being hard limits.
More articles about the study at: Association for Psychological Science and RT (includes two small tables).
(Score: 2) by carguy on Wednesday January 21 2015, @01:45PM
While this specific experiment may be new, false memories of crimes are well known -- here is one link to start a search,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_Memory_Syndrome_Foundation [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 5, Informative) by ikanreed on Wednesday January 21 2015, @02:12PM
This is about purposefully causing specific false memories.
The summary doesn't include the method of induction(which worked moderately well for non-crimes as well).
1. They reach the parents of the college student and ask for the story of a traumatic or intense event that happened in their subject's childhood.
2. They write a narrative that interleaves the crime(of a petty nature) with the events described.
3. They tell that story to the student.
4. Wait a week
5. Ask the student to recount the memory. Details of guilt from the crime will have become part of the memory in a substantial set of cases.
(Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Wednesday January 21 2015, @02:41PM
Yes, thank you and sorry about that, I really should have included it.
Bite harder Ouroboros, bite! tails.boum.org/ linux USB CD secure desktop IRC *crypt tor (not endorsements (XKeyScore))
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Thursday January 22 2015, @05:42AM
Classic that someone from Yogguth would know a thing or two about implanting memories, huh?
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday January 21 2015, @02:52PM
Which of course should make all eyewitness testimony in court immediately even more suspect than it should be already, because this would mean that absolutely anybody could be induced to remember observing or being victim of a crime that never happened.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Wednesday January 21 2015, @02:59PM
You're right and you're wrong.
You're wrong because criminologists and psychologists have established methodologies to help ensure better and more honest recollection by witnesses in criminal investigations.
You're right because those methodologies are still flawed, and aren't adhered to as much as we'd like to think they are.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 21 2015, @04:06PM
Ensuring honest recollection doesn't help if the information the witness honestly recollects is wrong.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Wednesday January 21 2015, @04:13PM
Come on.
Come on.
I explicitly said "better and more honest"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 21 2015, @04:23PM
Better for who?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 22 2015, @04:42PM
The recollection of the information can be perfect; if the information that gets recollected is already wrong, that doesn't help.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 21 2015, @08:32PM
Awesome! Plenty of time to get that worked into your propaganda feeds before 2016. Rev 1 will be in Perl, but it is trivial enough to port to Ruby while I'm at it. Who wants a copy? ;-)
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday January 21 2015, @04:12PM
This assumes that a more honest recollection of witnesses is the desired outcome. That isn't necessarily the case - unethical lawyers prepping their witnesses could use this to add false testimony to a trial and have the witness honestly believe that their testimony was true. That could very easily tip a case, especially if the crime in question was one where the only possible witnesses were the victim and the defendant.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by arashi no garou on Wednesday January 21 2015, @05:52PM
unethical lawyers prepping their witnesses could use this to add false testimony to a trial and have the witness honestly believe that their testimony was true.
I'm almost 100% sure this happens all the time. Most of my background was on the law enforcement side of things, but I've been in enough courtrooms to see it happen. A witness will begin recounting their statement, and you can feel the prosecution nudging them, right there on the stand, to remember it a certain way. Most of the time the defense will step up and "poke holes" in the witness' statement that will attempt to counter the finessed memories. And sometimes it's the defense doing the finessing and the prosecution has to poke the holes in the story. But no matter which side of the table, most lawyers are adept at helping witnesses and victims to create false or partly false memories to prop up their case.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 22 2015, @06:18AM
Maybe so, but are those methodologies used by the police? Or in Guatanamo or similar?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fells_Acres_Day_Care_Center_preschool_trial#Interviews_of_children_as_evidence [wikipedia.org]
See also: http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/study_finds_memories_can_change_with_each_recall/ [abajournal.com]
http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2012/09/your-memory-is-like-the-telephone-game.html [northwestern.edu]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 22 2015, @06:20AM
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday January 22 2015, @04:35AM
Perhaps even more to the point, confessions should hold a greatly reduced weight if current police interrogation tactics were employed before it was given. A recanted confession should hold no weight at all.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday January 21 2015, @06:39PM
There....are ....four....lights!
(Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Wednesday January 21 2015, @02:33PM
Yes you're absolutely right about that. This study is hopefully the beginning of much more. I think it is important that everyone is made highly aware of it and how little it takes.
It isn't much different from the idea of ghosthacking used in the Ghost in the Shell movies and series. Except that any biological brain will do just fine. Anyone who knows enough about you and talk with you once in a while can give you entirely false memories that you will consider to be facts. While there's probably a lot of it already the potential for abuse and social engineering is enormous.
Bite harder Ouroboros, bite! tails.boum.org/ linux USB CD secure desktop IRC *crypt tor (not endorsements (XKeyScore))
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 21 2015, @04:12PM
In many criminal story movies, when the police doesn't believe the version from the suspect, some police officer says: "OK, now I'm going to tell you how it really was" and then tells how the police currently assumes the crime happened.
If this is not just fiction, but happens the same way in real cases, I wonder how often the police unknowingly implants elements of their version into the suspect's memory of the events.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 22 2015, @01:15PM
What makes you think they do it unknowingly?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 21 2015, @04:44PM
These aren't the droids you're looking for.