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

psychologicalscience.org

41–50 of 221 posts

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

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Starring one of my favorite actors, AI Pacino

I could go for a Dunkaccino.

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

#42
post #26

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.

>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.

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

#43
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...

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

#44
post #28

> 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'…

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)?

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

#45
post #28

> 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'…

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

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

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

#46
post #37

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 d…

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.

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

#47
post #9

> ~70+ % I wonder if this is an inherent brain bias thing, leaving some more susceptible than others.

[flagged]

Even worse, a good portion of the population believes that a good portion now believes that ... whatever you just said. And this good portion is annoying. Bring up nonsense like this in conversations where it does not fit, in the middle of dinner, in the middle of pumping gas. Like damn, I'm watching out for one of those kids with a gun just waiting to exhibit his mental health and you want me to worry about the guy in a dress?

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

#48
post #44
post #28

> 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'…

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)?

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).

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

#49
post #26

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.

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.

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

#50
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)?

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).

Except in this case for the follow up interviews there was no incentive to lie.
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