Should I believe this? Reality monitoring of accounts of self-experienced and invented recent and distant autobiographical events

Abstract

To examine personal and interpersonal reality monitoring, 240 participants wrote accounts of invented or self-experienced autobiographical events. Half the participants wrote about a distant event that happened before the age of 15 and half wrote about a recent event that happened after the age of 15. Using a yoked design, participants rated the qualitative details of their own accounts and the details of other participants' accounts. Consistent with previous research, we found that self-experienced accounts contained more qualitative details than invented accounts, and that accounts of recent events contained more qualitative details than accounts of distant events. Participants rated their own accounts as more qualitatively detailed than other participants' accounts, which suggests that they did not base their self-ratings solely on the written details. We discuss the practical and theoretical importance of our findings.

Source confusion influences the effectiveness of the autobiographical IAT

“…One such heuristic involves evaluating the qualitative detail associated with mental representations: More sensory information (e.g., smells, sounds, and images; Johnson, Foley, Suengas, & Raye, 1988) can imply that a memory is real, all other things being equal. However, active imagining can increase the qualitative details typical of a real memory, and the passage of time can decrease qualitative details (Dobson & Markham, 1993;Johnson et al, 1988;Sporer & Sharman, 2006). Anything that causes the characteristics of an imagined event to become more similar to a real event increases source confusion, and thus the likelihood that a false memory will be judged to be true.…”

Value of Content-Based Deception Detection Methods

“…In turn, other studies allow to draw a conclusion that RM works well only in the case of statements from adults (e.g. Sporer, Kuepper, 1995, Sporer andSharman, 2006) and older children (Santtila, Roppola, Niemi, 2000;Stromwall, Granhag, 2005). In turn, for example, studies conducted by Roberts and Lamb (2010) ascertained that the older the child, the more RM criteria are present in his or her testimonies, and the eff ect was far more stronger in the case of true statements, then the false ones.…”

“…Th ese indicators diff er in scientifi c studies (both experimental and practical), yet studies prove that the total accuracy rate of the CBCA usually oscillates between 55% (Granhag, Strömwall, Landström, 2006) and 100% (Esplin, Boychuk, Raskin, 1988), and in the case of the RM -between 61% (Sporer, Sharman, 2006) and 82% (Stromwall, Granhag, 2005). Falling back on the literature concerning matters of deception, Vrij (2008) sets the average accuracy rate of CBCA at 70.81%, and that of RM -at 68.8%.…”

Underlying processes behind false perspective production

“…a) Mounting evidence (Bensi, Gambetti, Nori, & Giusberti, 2009;Campos & AlonsoQuecuty, 1998;Colwell, Hiscock-Anisman, Memon, Colwell, Taylor, & Woods, 2009;Comblain, D'Argembeau & Van der Linden, 2005;Diges, 1995;Diges, Rubio & Rodríguez, 1992;Henkel, Franklin & Johnson, 2000;Manzanero, El-Astal & Aróztegui, 2009;Memon, Fraser, Colwell, Odinot & Mastroberardino, 2010;Pérez-Mata & Diges, 2007;Roberts & Lamb, 2010) suggests that numerous factors (activation levels, coherence and previous knowledge, perceptual modality, subjects' involvement degree and perspective, age, contextual factors, type of design used in the research, training of the evaluators, and the coding method) influence the characteristics of statements. b) There is also great variability in the possible origins of memories and different sources produce distinctive characteristics which vary depending on whether they are from fantasy, lies, dreams or post-event information (Hekkanen & McEvoy, 2005;Johnson, Kahan & Raye, 1984;Sporer & Sharman, 2006;Vrij et al, 2004). c) Moreover, within each source there are different degrees on a continuum from perceptual memories to the most fantastic memories.…”

“…Although the CBCA came independently to the studies on the RM processes, assumptions are shared, and both have been proposed as a method to assess the credibility of the statements with similar results, albeit RM could be more sensitive than CBCA (Granhag, Strömwall, & Landström, 2006). Sporer and Sharman (2006) analysed made-up or true autobiographical data according to clarity, how vivid they were, sensory, spatial and temporal information, quality of the memory, significance and realism, in the theoretical framework of RM. Results showed significant differences in the predicted direction only for temporal information and realism.…”