Law enforcement professionals must rely on the memories of witnesses, victims, and suspects on an almost daily basis in the course of investigations. Unfortunately, memories can be riddled with conflicting information and errors. But how can investigators or those interviewing people tell the difference between an accurate memory and an erroneous or false memory of a crime? Can people come to “remember” crimes that never happened?
In a study that was published in March 2015, the author examined whether people, when interviewed by the police, can falsely generate vivid, detail-rich memories of committing crimes.1 A combination of interview tactics was employed to test the generation of these richly detailed, false confessions. The overall structure of the interviews was a modified version of the common investigative interviewing procedure known as the “cognitive interview,” which relies on asking free-recall questions, followed by probing questions about specific details. This generally effective interview procedure was then laced with misleading tactics for the purpose of the study.
