Public beliefs on the relationship between lying and memory

ABSTRACT

In two studies, we surveyed the beliefs of undergraduate students (Study 1) and the general public (Study 2) about deceptive behavior, memory functioning, and the effects of lying on memory. We compared participants’ beliefs with the current memory and deception literature. Overall, participants in both studies believed that different types of lies (i.e. false denials, feigning amnesia, fabrication) would elicit different memory impairing effects, although they did not know what specific kind of memory impairment (e.g. forgetting, false memory). In line with previous experimental studies, participants experienced difficulties in retrieving memories after falsely denying or feigning amnesia. Moreover, participants believed that lying would impact other people’s memory such as that people would start to believe in their own lies. Meanwhile, they also indicated that these effects would be minimal for themselves. Interestingly, our results showed that false denials are used quite frequently in daily life. Finally, we found that undergraduate students’ beliefs about memory were in line with scientific evidence, while the general public continues to have erroneous beliefs about memory. When the general public plays a role in the courtroom (e.g. jury members), we recommend involving memory experts in the assessment of reliability of statements when lying was involved.

KEYWORDS:

• Deception
• public opinion
• memory
• self-deception
• jury

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Tables are provided with individual scores for each level of (dis)agreement.

2 Different deceptive strategies were given in written text by the participants. The majority of written responses coincided with fabricating a new story. However, we did not include this with fabrication as the participants thought they were different deceptive strategies.

3 The different deceptive strategy aligned most with fabricating a new story. However, we did not include this with fabrication as the participant indicated that it was a different deceptive strategy.

4 MTurk is an online crowdsourcing platform to recruit remote workers that complete Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) such as psychological experiments or surveys.

5 We did not calculate an a priori sample size for Study 1 because we recruited the participants from the “criminological psychology” lecture. Hence, we simply recruited as many participants possible in Study 1.

6 MTurk participants were recruited by posting a hit named “Answer questions about your beliefs and knowledge about lying”. The requirements for MTurk participants were a HIT approval rate of 98% and more than 5000 HITs approved.

7 One participant responded that he/she was 120 years old. This was the maximum age. This was either a typo or the participant did not want to give his/her real age. For the mean age, hence, we excluded this participant.

8 Thirty-three participants claimed that they used a different deceptive strategy. However, analyzing their written responses did not reveal different deceptive strategies than the already given options. Thus, we excluded these participants because they indicated that they were different deceptive strategies. However, the rank order of the three deceptive strategies did not change when taking these written responses into account.

9 Again, other deceptive strategies coincided most with fabrication. However, we did not include these participants because they indicated that they were different deceptive strategies.