Researchers studying the misinformation effect tend to present the event in one of two formats: slides or video. Both have their advantages and disadvantages. Videos capture much more information than slides, but slides permit easy counterbalancing of event details. We capitalised on digital technology to create a misinformation event that resolves many of the limitations inherent in earlier formats.

A psychotropic placebo can help people resist the misinformation effect, an effect thought to be caused by a shift to more stringent source monitoring. When this shift occurs has been unclear. To address this issue we gave some people - but not others - a phoney cognitive-enhancing drug we called R273. Shortly afterwards, everyone took part in a misinformation effect experiment. To gather evidence about source monitoring we surreptitiously recorded time to read the misleading postevent narrative, and response time at test. Our findings suggest that people shifted to more stringent source monitoring at test. Moreover, people with higher working memory capacity (WMC) performed better than people with lower WMC - but only when they were told they had received R273, a finding that fits with research showing that WMC can confer advantages in situations demanding effortful control, but not when automatic heuristics suffice.

Every day, people rely on prospective memory--our ability to remember to perform a future action--to carry out myriad tasks. We examined how a sham cognitive enhancing drug might improve people's performance on a prospective memory task. We gave some people (but not others) the sham drug, and asked everyone to perform a high-effort prospective memory task. People who received the sham drug performed better on the prospective memory task. They also took longer to perform their ongoing task, suggesting that they increased their effortful monitoring. These results fit with research showing that suggestions can lead people to increase cognitive effort and increase memory performance.

Beer drinking has long been valorised as a masculine performance and a social ritual. But as more women enter the craft beer industry, new opportunities emerge to reframe the cultural discourses around beer. With an interest in the stories women brewers ('brewsters') tell, we conducted interviews (n ¼ 6), and a textual analysis of brand strategies (n ¼ 10) used by women-owned beer brands in New Zealand. With an attention towards how gender identity factors into these narratives, we found that women largely reproduce the narrative trope of 'authenticity' utilised by craft brewers broadly. Gender identity is largely rendered invisible at the expense of promoting authenticity as a seemingly gender-neutral value. In New Zealand, however, these strategies must be contextualised in a cultural history in which beer drinking and national identity are fundamentally intertwined, and in ways that have has always been coded masculine. Our findings suggest that while branding can potentially enhance the visibility of women as legitimate producers of beer, New Zealand brewsters maintain craft beer as a P akeh a (White European) middle-class masculine cultural form.

<p>Decreasing physical pain, increasing emotional wellbeing, and improving physical health are just some of the ways placebos have affected people's physiological and psychological health (Crum & Langer, 2007; Kirsch & Sapirstein, 1999; Montgomery & Kirsch, 1997). Recently, Clifasefi, Garry, Harper, Sharman, and Sutherland (2007) demonstrated that a memory placebo called R273 could even reduce people's susceptibility to misleading information. Yet how could a substance with no physiologically active properties affect memory performance? That is the overarching question of this thesis. In order to monitor the sources of information about the past, and in order to remember future tasks and actions, people can either use an effortful monitoring process, or they can rely on their usual, automatic and effortless memory processes. Typically, the more monitoring that people use, the better their memory performance (Johnson, Hashtroudi, & Lindsay, 1993; Einstein et al., 2005). In this thesis, over three experiments, I examined how a placebo might affect the way people monitor information, thus improving aspects of retrospective and prospective memory. Experiment 1 examined whether R273 reduces people's susceptibility to the misinformation effect by leading them to switch from their habitual, automatic, and easy source monitoring to more deliberate and effortful source monitoring. To examine this question I used Clifasefi et al.'s (2007) sham drug procedure and then ran subjects through a three-stage misinformation experiment (Loftus, Miller, & Burns, 1978). The results of Experiments 1 suggest that R273 did not affect effortful monitoring during the post event information (PEI), but did affect effortful monitoring during the memory test. Experiment 2 aimed to find further evidence that R273 affects people's monitoring during the memory test. To address this question, all subjects were told that they had received an inactive drug before they took part in the first two stages of the misinformation effect paradigm. Immediately before taking the memory test, however, I falsely told some people that they had actually received R273. The primary finding of Experiment 2 added support to the idea that R273 affects subjects source monitoring during the memory test: Told Drug subjects were less misled than their Told Inactive counterparts. Finally, Experiment 3 further examined whether R273 leads people to use effortful monitoring, but did so using a prospective memory task, whose underlying memory processes align closely with those of source monitoring. The results showed that Told Drug subjects were slower to perform an ongoing and concurrent task, yet had better prospective memory performance than Told Inactive subjects. These results suggested that R273 lead Told Drug subjects' to use more effortful monitoring. In conclusion, the results suggest that the sham cognitive enhancing placebo R273 improves people's ability to resist misleading suggestion, and perform prospective memory tasks because it leads them to use more effortful monitoring.</p>