The forced confabulation effect occurs when subjects are pressed to confabulate information about a witnessed event and then later falsely recall memories for those events. Ackil and Zaragoza (1998) showed this effect in elementary school children. The first objective of this study was to examine how forced confabulation produces false memories in adults. The second objective was to see what effect the interviewer feedback had on the false memories. The specific question here is whether or not confirmatory feedback will influence memory for events that the witnesses would have normally regarded as untrue.

Methods

Participants from each of two groups (forced and free) viewed an 8 minute excerpt from an action packed Disney movie and were then interviewed.

Free group: Responded to 12 questions, and were told only to answer if they were sure

Forced group: Responded to 12 questions, but were told to answer every question even if they had to guess. 2 of the 4 false event questions were accompanied by confirmatory feedback and 2 were accompanied by neutral feedback.

Participants were interviewed after 1 week and were told that the first interviewer made some mistakes. They were again asked what they saw in the video and provided a confidence rating.

After 4 to 6 weeks participants were asked to freely recall what happened in the video.

Results

• Relative to neutral feedback, confirmatory feedback increased the proportion of false assents to the confabulated events, and increased participants confidence in their false assents
• When neutral feedback was provided false memories were protected by verbal resistance, but not by nonverbal resistance. When confirmatory feedback was provided, neither type of resistance protected against false memories.
• The results provide strong evidence that confirmatory feedback increase free recall of confabulated events when looking at the highest confidence ratings.

In addition to testing the participant’s memory for the video, their memory for the interview was tested as well.

Methods

This experiment was identical to experiment 1 with the exception that delayed free recall was not tested, and the memory for the interview was tested immediately after administering the recognition test.

Results

Participants remembered providing the confabulated items as responses, without remembering they had fabricated them; otherwise they would not have claimed they also remembered seeing the events.

Discussion

Confirmatory feedback may have led participants to discount any doubts they might have had about their confabulations.

Confirmatory feedback may have led participants to reflectively elaborate on the confabulated incidents in an effort to make them fit with the incidents that actually occurred.