The Psych Student

How well do people remember a made up account?

A lot of people like the idea that faking an illness should have the karmic result of having to eventually suffer the real deal. There’s a sort of “boy who cried wolf” ethic that permeates our cultural sense of justice. But just because we think something is deserved, that doesn’t necessarily mean it will actually happen to the guilty party.

Dave Munger at Cognitive Daily has reported on new studies regarding faked amnesia. Apparently, “focal retrograde amnesia” is a common defense in murder trials.  The article says amnesia is claimed by defendendents in 45 percent of murders (I believe this has to be U.S. murder cases and not global, and it would be good to see a citation on that statistic somehwere.)  “Psychologists know that this sort of amnesia is actually quite rare,” Munger writes, “so it’s very likely that most, if not all of these defendants are faking amnesia.”

“But in testing for faking amnesia, a secondary phenomenon seemed to be appearing. Several studies found that people who were asked to pretend to have amnesia were later unable to recall as much as people who told the truth from the start.

The studies worked like this: Volunteers were told a story — or actually acted out a story — where they were the primary character: “you” robbed someone, or beat a man to death with a pool cue, or killed a girl in a car accident. Then half these participants were told to pretend not to remember the key details of the crime in an effort to avoid punishment, while the other half was told to remember as many as possible of the details. They were tested on their memory (or their false reconstruction) immediately after the story, and then returned to the laboratory a week later, and this time everyone was asked to try to recall the details of the crime accurately. The volunteers who told the truth the first time around did better on the second test. Does this mean that faking amnesia impairs your memory later on? Not necessarily.”

- Mounger

But these studies had serious flaws, two of which this article goes into some good detail in explaining:

1. The memory difference was due to the fact that the truth-tellers had “practiced” giving the correct responses, while the fake amnesiaces were instructed to make something up different from the facts they were given about the incident. Muchger writes that “one study included a third group, which was not tested immediately after the ‘crime.’ This untested group performed just as badly the fake amnesics one week later.
2. The scenarios the subjects were given to work from weren’t very realistic. Due to this, the subjects (college students) may not have been able to recall them as they didn’t really relate to something that would realistically happen to them.

To this I would add a third problematic area. No one in this case is in fact telling “the truth” to begin with. Here’s the scenario:

“Student volunteers into three groups: fake amnesics, truth-tellers, and untested. Students heard one of two stories while they read along with a script. Here’s an excerpt from one of the stories, describing a party where the student has been drinking and meets a dog named Ollie:

“When you walk into the kitchen, you find it empty except for Ollie, who is curled up and sleeping in a little ball on his blue shag rug in the corner. Hearing you, he wakes up and leaps toward you, trying to play. You pick him up and he licks your face. When you put him down, he keeps jumping up trying to reach the counter. You realize he’s trying to get at the pile of chicken bones that have been left on an aluminum platter next to the sink. Thinking, “dogs like bones, ” you pick the biggest one an give it to him, saying, “Here you go, Ollie. You’d better not tell Sam I gave this to you!” …. [later] You turn around and realize that Ollie is choking… You realize that it could be that he’s choking on the bone you just fed him, which is now nowhere in sight.

Eventually the dog dies, and the students (in the fake amnesic and truth-telling groups) were asked to imagine confronting the owner the next day and explaining what happened. They wrote out a description of the key events and also answer a multiple-choice test. Then, a week later, everyone returned to write out the story again and retake the test.”

- Munger

The situation itself didn’t happen to anyone, so everyone was essentially making something up. Those who were able to rehearse the script had a slightly better memory than those who were given the script but told to deviate from it, which just sort of proves that doing your homework yields better results for most people, instead of just winging it.

“In other words, pretending to have amnesia doesn’t hurt your memory, but rehearsing the correct answers improves it,” Munger writes. I would suggest that this study doesn’t even verify that, as the correct answers are also not taken from an authentic experience. A better test would have been to run the students through a situation first and then have some of them relate what happened while others changed their stories.

“There’s still a separate question about how all this applies to the real world,” Munger adds. “A criminal probably does rehearse his or her alibi. How does this rehearsal affect memory for the actual crime? It’s hard to say, and also difficult to envision a study that would address this question.”

This test is actually a better examination into how well rehersal helps memory. A murderer would have to memorize a fake set of things as well, and repeate them to themselves.

There’s a start of a decent conversation about this in the comments at the post itself. But it’s amazing to me the type of research that can get the go ahead and make it as far as publications for review.

Sun, X., Punjabi, P., Greenberg, L., & Seamon, J. (2009). Does feigning amnesia impair subsequent recall? Memory & Cognition, 37 (1), 81-89 DOI: 10.3758/mc.37.1.81