Lying on misleading information: false confirmation leads to memory errors

ABSTRACT

Research on post-event misinformation demonstrated that being exposed to such information can undermine people’s memory for the original event. Similarly, studies on lying and memory showed that lying upon an event can negatively impact memory. We asked participants to read a case vignette about an accident, and answered some questions on true and misleading details. Participants either lied (i.e. liars group) or told the truth (i.e. truth-tellers group) about false misleading (distorted: details partially false and fabricated: completely false details compared to the ones in the case-vignette) information (Experiment 1). In Experiment 2, an additional group of participants was included who did not perform the lying/truth-telling phase (i.e. delayed test group). After 1-week, all participants genuinely recalled the case vignette and provided their beliefs for its occurrence. Liars reported more fabricated information than truth-tellers (Experiment 1). The delayed test group reported fewer correct information than the other groups while liars reported more memory errors than the former (Experiment 2). Also, liars reported lower recollection and belief ratings than truth-tellers (Experiment 1), while the delayed test group reported lower recollection and beliefs than both liars and truth-tellers (Experiment 2). Overall, our findings showed that lying on misinformation results in memory errors.

KEYWORDS:

• Lying
• false post-event information
• correct information
• memory errors

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Materials and Preregistered. The materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/2eur7/ and https://osf.io/2eur7/ .

Ethical statement

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional research committee (protocol number Experiment 1: G-2020 12 2034; protocol number Experiment 2: ERCPN-218_15_02_2020) and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 We recruited a larger sample size because we expected a larger attrition effect due to delay between Session 1 and Session 2.

2 The reasoning behind our power analysis is the same as Experiment 1.

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by a C1 grant (Application number: C14/19/013) from KU Leuven (Belgium) and a FWO Senior Research Project grant (Application number: G0D3621N; Research Foundation – Flanders, Belgium)