All participants in this study were shown a video of a car crash, then approximately half the participants were asked how fast the car was going when it "smashed" into the other car, while the other half were asked how fast the car was going when it 'bumped" into the other car. The participants in the first group tended to misremember the car going faster than those in the second group.

Pepperdine University

A distortion of one's memory in which they inaccurately remember an event or information.

False Memories

Britt, M. A., Rouet, J.-F., Blaum, D., & Millis, K. (2019). A Reasoned Approach to Dealing With Fake News. Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 6(1), 94–101. https://doi.org/10.1177/2372732218814855

A Reasoned Approach to Dealing With Fake News

A type of memory distortion in which an individual’s memory of an event becomes more aligned with another person’s reported memory of the event.


Memory conformity

False memory experiment (Loftus, 1979)

The formation of false memories can be reduced if one is warned about the potential to form false memories before they learn information that may trigger a false memory. However, giving this warning after one learns information that may trigger false memories is ineffective at reducing the impact and formation of false memories.

False memory warning

A way to measure a participant's susceptibility to misinformation. 
- Phase 1: participant is exposed to a complex event.
- Phase 2: after exposure to the event, someone else comments on the event, usually presenting misinformation.
- Phase 3: participant is tested on their memory of the source of details (whether it came from the event itself or the second source).


Three-phase misinformation paradigm (Loftus et al., 1978)

Psychologist, Daniel Schacter, provides specifics about how fragile long-term memory can be, through the seven sins of memory, which provide seven ways our long term memory can fail us.  

The Seven Sins of Memory

Refers to the recall of false memories from one's own life. The recall often occurs during therapy sessions where adults seemingly recover memories of physical or sexual abuse from their childhood. However, the term is not an officially recognized diagnostic term. In addition, this condition is especially controversial in cases where there are no independent witnesses to the events, where typically only the victim and perpetrator are present.

Learn Before

Related