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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 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.
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