By The Free Thought Project on January 18, 2015

With enough personal background information about someone’s past, an interviewer can quite easily manipulate that person into confessing to a crime that he or she did not commit – or which never even happened, alleges a new study.

RT.com

Researchers from Britain’s University of Bedfordshire and Canada’s University of British Columbia based their study on a questionnaire filled out by the primary caregivers of 60 university students. The relatives were requested to describe events that the students experienced between the ages of 11 and 14.

Upon receiving the surveys, psychologists then questioned the students themselves about their past experiences, in a series of three 40-minute “friendly” interviews.

Researchers announced that 70 percent of participants were eventually tricked into believing they committed a crime – including theft, assault, or assault with a weapon – that led to police questioning.

The research, published in Psychological Science, shows that those students surveyed internalized the stories they were told, later re-telling them in great detail – even though they never took place. With “suggestive memory-retrieval techniques,”those questioned generated “criminal and noncriminal emotional false memories” that were compared with “true memories of emotional events,”the study says.