Affiliation:
1. Fudan University Shanghai China
2. KU Leuven Leuven Belgium
3. Maastricht University Maastricht the Netherlands
4. University of Portsmouth Portsmouth UK
Abstract
AbstractEyewitness testimony serves as important evidence in the legal system. Eyewitnesses of a crime can be either the victims themselves—for whom the experience is highly self‐referential—or can be bystanders who witness and thus encode the crime in relation to others. There is a gap in past research investigating whether processing information in relation to oneself versus others would later impact people's suggestibility to misleading information. In two experiments (Ns = 68 and 122) with Dutch and Chinese samples, we assessed whether self‐reference of a crime event (i.e., victim vs. bystander) affected their susceptibility to false memory creation. Using a misinformation procedure, we photoshopped half of the participants' photographs into a crime slideshow so that they saw themselves as victims of a nonviolent crime, while others watched the slideshow as mock bystander witnesses. In both experiments, participants displayed a self‐enhanced suggestibility effect: Participants who viewed themselves as victims created more false memories after receiving misinformation than those who witnessed the same crime as bystanders. These findings suggest that self‐reference might constitute a hitherto new risk factor in the formation of false memories when evaluating eyewitness memory reports.
Subject
Law,Psychiatry and Mental health,Clinical Psychology