ABSTRACT
To investigate whether participants might develop false memories of their forced fabrications, we have employed a modified version of the misinformation paradigm originally developed by E. Loftus (e.g., Loftus, Miller, & Burns, 1978). As in the typical eyewitness suggestibility study, in the forced fabrication paradigm, all participants view an eyewitness event, are subsequently exposed to a suggestive manipulation, and are later tested on their memory for the witnessed event, with the goal of assessing whether the suggestive manipulation has contaminated the originally witnessed memory. Where the forced fabrication paradigm differs from the traditional paradigm is in the nature of the suggestive manipulation. In the traditional paradigm, the experimenter provides some piece of false or misleading information, typically by presupposing its existence in an interview questionnaire or narrative description of the event the participant is asked to read. In the forced fabrication paradigm, by contrast, rather than being told some falsehood, participant-witnesses engage in face-to-face interviews with the experimenter where, in addition to answering questions about true events they did witness, they are asked “false event” questions about blatantly nonexistent objects or events and are pressed to provide answers to these unanswerable questions. Importantly, the participant-witness is not permitted to evade the interviewer’s request to provide an answer to the false-event questions. Rather, participants are informed ahead of time that they must respond to all questions, even if they have to guess. Although participants resist answering these false-event questions, the interviewer “forces” them to comply by repeatedly insisting that they just “give their best guess” until participants eventually acquiesce by providing a relevant response.
