Wrongly convicted adults can actually be convinced they committed a crime that never happened, according to a new study.
A team of researchers interviewed 60 innocent students about their role in a series of crimes that they were not involved in. The researchers brought the students to a lab for three 40-minute interviews evenly spaced out over the course of three weeks. The primary caregivers of the students filled out a questionnaire that discussed specific events the students might have experienced from ages 11 to 14. They were asked to provide as much detail as possible and not to share the questions with the students.
Some of the false crimes involved contact with the police (assault, assault with a weapon, or theft). Other false crimes were more emotional in nature, such as personal injury, attack by a dog, or loss of a huge sum of money.
In the first interview the student was accused of a crime. In the second and third interviews the student was asked to recall the details of the crime even if they said they didn't do it.
The survey found that 71 percent of the students who were falsely accused of committing a crime as a teenager were classified as having developed a false memory of the crime.
Similarly, 76 percent of the students who were falsely accused of emotional natured crimes formed memories of these events that didn't actually happen.
"In such circumstances, inherently fallible and reconstructive memory processes can quite readily generate false recollections with astonishing realism," Julia Shaw, the lead researcher in the study said. "In these sessions we had some participants recalling incredibly vivid details and re-enacting crimes they never committed."
The researchers learned that incorporating true details, such as the name of an actual friend, into a false account gave the alleged situation just enough familiarity that it came to seem plausible.
The study was published in the journal Association for Psychological Science.
