Sharman, S. J., Manning, C. G., & Garry, M. (2005). Explain this: Explaining childhood
events inflates confidence for those events. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 19, 67-74.
The authors wanted to extend the findings of the imagination inflation literature to determine if explaining how an event could have happened in the past would lead to increased confidence that it actually had occurred. The original studies on imagination inflation used a three step procedure: rating the likelihood that events had happened, imagining some events and not imagining others, and rating the likelihood again. The authors used the same basic three-step procedure but instead of imagining the event, the participants were asked to explain how it could have happened.
Method
The experiment took place in two sessions. In session one, participants completed the Life Events Inventory (LEI). In session two, participants explained how four of the events could have happened. In addition, the experimenter told the participants that the original LEI had been lost, and so they were asked to complete it again.
Results
The mean confidence ratings of pre- and post- test for the explained and control events are presented in Table 1. The authors used the analysis method recommended by Garry et al. (2001) and concluded that participants who explained the events were more likely to increase their confidence in those events than participants who imagined the events. (see Figure 1).
Discussion
The authors conclude that the results show that encountering an event once is compelling enough to raise confidence about participants’ beliefs about their pasts. They argue that this occurs because explaining an event increases the event’s fluency, making it more cognitively available, thus making it seem more likely to have occurred.
Important Legal
Disclaimer: The preceding are articles we read together in the Lampinen Lab Fall 2005 false memory reading group. By
clicking on the button next to the article you can see the summary of that
article. The summary was prepared by the student presenting that article and it
is of course the case that the views expressed in the summary do not
necessarily represent the views of the reading group as a whole, Dr. Lampinen, the Lampinen Lab,
Hugo's, the University of Arkansas, the Razorback Football or Basketball teams
(although we're not sure about cross country), people living down the street
from us, Bob Dylan, Jack Fate, our extended families, or anyone else for that
matter except for the student who wrote the summary (and they don't necessarily
believe what they wrote either).