What is rich false memory?

Elizabeth Loftus, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

Elizabeth Loftus answers

A rich false memory is one in which a person feels confident about an event that never happened, provides elaborate detail about it, and may even express strong emotion — all for something entirely fabricated.1 The term grew directly out of the implantation work. When subjects were told by family members that they had been lost in a shopping mall as a child, frightened and crying before being rescued by an elderly stranger, a meaningful portion of them not only accepted the suggestion but began elaborating it spontaneously — adding details no one had given them.2

Bill, in one early case, remembered the elevator bells at Sears. Brittany added pumpkins and batches of cookies. Chris supplied flannel shirts and conversations.3 Nobody planted those details. The subjects generated them, which is precisely what makes the phenomenon so striking. Across a set of studies using the familial informant procedure — where family members first confirm an event never occurred, and researchers then suggest it did — roughly 31% of participants on average developed false memories of the suggested event.4

And the events were not trivial: being hospitalized overnight, nearly drowning, being attacked by an animal.5 Even impossible events — like shaking hands with Bugs Bunny at Disneyland, which cannot have happened because Bugs Bunny is a Warner Brothers character — produced false belief in a substantial minority of subjects.6 What the research does not yet tell us is how to look at any single memory and determine whether it is true or false.7

Confidence, detail, and emotional intensity — the very markers that make a memory feel real to the person holding it, and persuasive to a jury — are exactly the features that rich false memories share with accurate ones.

Sources

  1. The term rich false memories was coined to refer to instances in which the person feels confident, provides details, and even expresses strong emotions about made-up events that never happened.
    Internal and external sources of misinformation in adult witness memory (In M.P Toglia, J.D Read, D.F Ross, & R.C.L Lindsay (Eds) Handbook of eyewitness psychology (Vol l) Memory for events Mahwah, NJ- Erlbaum p 195-237, 2007), p. 21
  2. My initial study involved an attempt to plant memories of something that would have been at least mildly traumatic if the event had actually happened. The subjects were led through suggestion to believe that they were, at age five or six, lost in a shopping mall, frightened, crying, and ultimately rescued by an elderly person and reunited with their family.
    Eyewitness Science, pp. 7–8
  3. Jenny remembered being scared. Brittany embellished the memory with pumpkins and batches of cookies. Chris embellished his memory with conversations and flannel shirts. Bill added elevator bells.
    Manufacturing false memories using bits of reality (In L M Reder (Ed.) Implicit memory and metacognition Mahwah, NJ- Erlbaum, pp 195-220, 1996), pp. 10–11
  4. Reviewing a set of such studies, Lindsay et al. (2004) found that on average 31% of participants develop false memories of the suggested event.
    Internal and external sources of misinformation in adult witness memory (In M.P Toglia, J.D Read, D.F Ross, & R.C.L Lindsay (Eds) Handbook of eyewitness psychology (Vol l) Memory for events Mahwah, NJ- Erlbaum p 195-237, 2007), p. 21
  5. researchers have led participants to develop such diverse false memories as having been lost in a mall for an extended time and later rescued by an elderly bystander, painful physical injuries, having been hospitalized overnight, having an accident at a family wedding, having been nearly drowned and rescued by a lifeguard, having been the victim of a vicious animal attack.
    Internal and external sources of misinformation in adult witness memory (In M.P Toglia, J.D Read, D.F Ross, & R.C.L Lindsay (Eds) Handbook of eyewitness psychology (Vol l) Memory for events Mahwah, NJ- Erlbaum p 195-237, 2007), p. 21
  6. subjects in one study were told falsely that they had received a skin graft as part of a routine medical procedure as a child... subjects who viewed a suggestive advertisement for Disney came to believe that, as children, they had met and shook hands with Bugs Bunny at Disneyland... Bugs Bunny is a Warner Brothers character, and Disney does not have Warner Brothers' characters in its theme parks.
    How to tell if a particular memory is true or false, pp. 372–373
  7. the focus on single rich memories presently does not tell us whether a particular memory is true or false.
    How to tell if a particular memory is true or false, pp. 372–373