
People Can Be Convinced They Committed a Crime That Never Happened - albanlv
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/people-can-be-convinced-they-committed-a-crime-they-dont-remember.html
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dsugarman
There is a bagel place near where I grew up that had a strange link to a
double homicide. Basically one partner owed another partner half a million
dollars and the owed partner, along with his wife, wound up dead. The other
partner faked his death and fled to California. The police arrested the
murdered couple's son and convinced him that he killed his own parents, threw
him in jail and locked away the key. It was 17 years before he would be let
free of crimes virtually everyone in the community knew he did not commit.

[1][http://murderpedia.org/male.T/t/tankleff-
martin.htm](http://murderpedia.org/male.T/t/tankleff-martin.htm)
[2][http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/nyregion/01tankleff.html?g...](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/nyregion/01tankleff.html?gwh=1940B18B67DFECF05D75D975E34A9FB6&gwt=pay&_r=0)

~~~
jacquesm
He's extremely lucky in that he didn't get sentenced to death. What an
incredibly ugly story.

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cehrnrooth
There was a great article in the New Yorker about police interrogation
techniques and how they can influence people to confess to crimes (and the
studies that explain why people would falsely confess).

[1][http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/09/the-
interview-7](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/09/the-interview-7)

~~~
TillE
This is probably the most important point I remember from "The Demon-Haunted
World", in which Carl Sagan repeatedly demonstrates that human memory is
completely unreliable, and that false memories can even be accidentally
created by a therapist. People who say they've been abducted by aliens usually
aren't lying; they genuinely believe it.

~~~
mjklin
The book Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) by Tavris and Aronson delves into
this in great detail. Well worth a read.

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dghf
Is convincing people they committed a crime really ethical? My self-image as a
pretty peaceable, pretty honest person is fairly important to me: if I
suddenly "remembered" a time when I stole from or attacked someone (with a
weapon, no less) I'd be certainly upset, possibly traumatised.

Can anyone really give meaningful consent for an exercise like this? They paid
the participants $50, but presumably they couldn't tell them exactly what was
going on, or it wouldn't have worked.

~~~
nsajko
Well, if the research can prove and point out to the general public that this
kind of false memory already widely affects serious matters such as criminal
investigation it is probably okay.

~~~
colordrops
What if we could cure cancer and heart disease by physically debilitating a
few dozen people? Would that also be okay?

~~~
firethief
Of course. Debilitating a few dozen people is nothing compared to the harm
caused by cancer and heart disease, and if we had a choice between the two it
would be wrong to pick the greater evil.

Is the premise of the question that choosing inaction adverts culpability, in
a situation where either outcome is abhorrent? But inaction has only the
appearance of innocence: if you really have the choice of which outcome will
occur, you cannot absolve yourself of responsibility by going with a default.
The fact that the greater evil is the status quo doesn't make it a more
ethical choice.

~~~
k-mcgrady
>> "Of course. Debilitating a few dozen people is nothing compared to the harm
caused by cancer and heart disease, and if we had a choice between the two it
would be wrong to pick the greater evil."

You say that like it's fact but it's your opinion based on your ethics.
There's also information we don't know. Are these people volunteering or being
selected against their will? Either way it would also be fine to argue that
the rights of those people are so important that society can't debilitate them
even if it solves cancer and heart disease. Everybody has to die of something
so why ruin these peoples lives when the people saved by not getting heart
disease/cancer die from something else anyway?

~~~
pwr22
From the standpoint of maximising human survival it is the right call

------
LinaLauneBaer
One more reason to not talk to the police... Relevant explanation by an
expert:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc)

~~~
ricardonunez
The first time I watched that video I got disturbed of how easy you can get in
trouble. I asked a lawyer friend and he told me the stories you see in the
news are more common than people think.

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toddrew
We played a trick on my friend Jerry that I worked with in the military. The
previous night we had a few drinks and then called it a night and walked home
together.

Jerry, in the morning mentioned to someone that his shoulder really hurt, but
he couldn't remember hurting it.

We came up with a plan that morning to convince Jerry that he had been
sideswiped by a taxi, and got into a fight with a taxi driver. We emailed
everyone we were with the night before, explained to them what we were doing,
and started planting that idea in Jerry's mind.

At first he claimed that it never happened. He kept saying he knew we were
just fucking with him.

More and more people corroborated the story. We even had a military police
officer call him on the phone to inquire about the incident. We got his boss
to sit him down and have a talk with him about his problem with alcohol (he
doesn't drink that much).

Eventually as the story was repeated to him by everyone, especially people
with authority, Jerry went from:

"this never happened.. I only had two beer last night" to: "hmm... maybe I was
really drunk after all... but I don't remember anything" to: "Yeah... I
remember everything now! How could I have forgotten before? Crazy!?!?"

He turned our story into real memories and even started adding his own details
to the story. We thought that was hilarious.

That night we all got together and told Jerry that it was all just a joke. He
couldn't believe it. He argued with us that he was sure it did happen. He
remembered it. When he finally accepted it he felt really dumb, but it was a
really fun day at work for us, so definitely worth it.

~~~
crpatino
> ... he felt really dumb, but it was a really fun day at work for us, so
> definitely worth it.

Congratulations!!! Probably every convicted rapist though something equivalent
at some point, so you are in good company to be sure.

~~~
toddrew
Reaching a bit?

~~~
crpatino
Guilty as charged.

It's still a bit jerky to do that to someone you call "a friend".

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Joeri
This happens conversely as well, where the person would remember a rosy
version of events in which they themselves acted quite badly in actuality.
Just because a person believes they did not do something bad doesn't mean they
didn't. It has led me to automatically put into doubt stories people tell me
that I did not witness myself.

~~~
pwr22
But how can you trust your own witness when you are also a person and just as
susceptible as anyone else?

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kazinator
If false memories can be planted in those who are accused, it can be done to
witnesses too, so that they swear that the shriveled nonagenarian in the
courtroom is the same person as the guard in that Nazi camp more than sixty
years ago.

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jonsen
Reminds me of the excellent movie Under Suspicion

[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_Suspicion_(2000_film)](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_Suspicion_\(2000_film\))

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spiritplumber
This is the most Kafkian thing I've read all day.

~~~
waps
It's one of the things that seems extremely weird if you consider humans to be
what they say they are ... and dead normal if you realize what humans actually
are.

How memory works, according to humanity : we store all data input in our mind,
where it stays. Every now and again some data disappears or is overwritten.

5 seconds of thinking about how a mind looks and what it does will leave you
with 100 very hard questions about how you could possibly make that happen in
a neural network.

How memory works, the real version : you "learn" memory. When a person is
presented with a pointer to a specific point in time or a specific event, his
mind then reconstructs the memory by repeatedly asking the question "what
happened next ?". All the data produced comes from the predictor, not from
actual memory.

So what is actually stored in your memory ? Well useful things. Not an index
of dates combined with what happened. But "I start my day, then wash my teeth,
then make a piece of toast, then ..."

"What did you do yesterday ?"

("conversation" in someone's mind starts happening :

"well obviously I woke up. Then what ? I washed my teeth. Ok, then what ?

 __interrogator interrupts __You ate a biscuit __your mind __

Ok that sounds reasonable, and I 'm not all that sure at all. He may be right.
I'll go with it)

Memory changed. Next time you remember it will be a lot easier to go with the
changed memory.

When you remember something, the memory is not "recalled" like on a computer,
but recreated from scratch. You start with a specific event (that itself may
or may not have happened, but it must be quite normal for it to happen so the
predictor doesn't see it as too unlikely). Because external persons can both
contribute and interfere with the recreation process it can be used to change
memories (your mind doesn't separate multiple inputs, so if a person is
talking when you're recalling, it influences the recall process). You want
your memory to be accurate, spend a while with extremely limited inputs first.

Because of how the predictor works, it "synchronizes" with other people's
predictors (nothing magical, it simply predicts what the other person's mind
is doing and takes that into account). But that results in that if you have
extreme uncertainty about an event and the person you're talking to feels very
strongly about it, your mind will be quite likely to follow the other person's
convictions.

Keep doing this, and you can convince someone they're a monster (note:
requires that the interrogator believes that to be true, builds trust and
avoids firing the "bullshit detector" and even then large changes require
quite a bit of time)

There are a few more of these things that are quite normal, given that our
minds copy others' behaviors, but people find extremely hard to believe. The
one I have refused to believe for the longest time was that people who get
abused, whether by a military, simply be economic situation, or even when
kidnapped, initially want to get out. But if the situation persists, the no
longer want the abuse to stop. They want to become the abuser (because that
person is the person their mind most often gives attention to). For a behavior
copy "machine", this is expected and normal. In psychology this simple fact
has been known for centuries. Many other counterintuitive facts become easy to
explain (e.g. why commercials work).

~~~
spiritplumber
This is the most enlightening thing I've read thsi year, thank you!

------
rbrogan
"The fact that the students appeared to internalize the false events to the
extent that they did highlights the fundamental malleability of memory"

Is it true that the memories themselves are false or is it the remembering
process that is influenced to produce false beliefs about what happened?

~~~
click170
Consider the anomaly of Deja Vu.

Did this moment actually happen previously and your remembering it again, or
is a chemical reaction in your brain tricking you into thinking you've had
this thought before?

~~~
jacquesm
Deja-Vu is actually something else, it's a phenomenon that is apparently
triggered by the different lengths of travel that information can take through
the brain, causing the same information to be presented twice, once directly
from the source and once indirectly.

~~~
anigbrowl
Any chance of a reference for that? I'm in the middle of adapting a story
about this and haven't heard this idea before, I'd love to learn more about
it.

~~~
jacquesm
Let me look that up, it's been a while.

One moment.

Edit: ok, found it:

[http://science.howstuffworks.com/science-vs-myth/deja-
vu4.ht...](http://science.howstuffworks.com/science-vs-myth/deja-vu4.htm)

"Another theory is based on the way our brain processes new information and
how it stores long- and short-term memories. Robert Efron tested an idea at
the Veterans Hospital in Boston in 1963 that stands as a valid theory today.
He proposed that a delayed neurological response causes déjà vu. Because
information enters the processing centers of the brain via more than one path,
it is possible that occasionally that blending of information might not
synchronize correctly.

Efron found that the temporal lobe of the brain's left hemisphere is
responsible for sorting incoming information. He also found that the temporal
lobe receives this incoming information twice with a slight (milliseconds-
long) delay between transmissions -- once directly and once again after its
detour through the right hemisphere of the brain. If that second transmission
is delayed slightly longer, then the brain might put the wrong timestamp on
that bit of information and register it as a previous memory because it had
already been processed. That could explain the sudden sense of familiarity."

The article contains a lot of other theories about the origin of Deja-Vu as
well but that one seems to have stood the test of time very well.

~~~
corin_
If you read it from another source and remember anything else about deja vu,
don't suppose you recall anything about this: I don't think I've experienced a
pure deja vu since I was a child (so 10-15 years), but since then I do get -
not frequently, but every now and then - what I call "double deja vu"s, i.e.
instead of thinking I've seen/whatever something before, I think I've had deja
vu of something before. So it feels like this is the 3rd time, not the 2nd.

Never found any information on or even many other people reporting this
though.

~~~
jacquesm
There is a strong correlation between people experiencing frequent deja-vu and
epilepsy. The reason I remembered all this is that a friends child was
diagnosed with epilepsy a while ago and I read everything I could on the
subject and one of the offshoots of all that reading was a bunch of stuff
about deja-vu.

Maybe that would be a good starting subject for some 'light reading'.

~~~
corin_
Thanks, as far as I'm aware I don't have epilepsy but my brain definitely has
some other odd wiring.. Will look into epilepsy more anyway :)

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pknerd
Oh it can be sumup in a single word, _Politics_

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Zelphyr
Makes me wonder if this might be put to more productive use. Like, convincing
people that they don't habitually talk during movies thus making them stop?

~~~
Retra
Maybe we could convince people that they are 'good drivers.'

~~~
xnull1guest
Most bad drivers I know _are_ convinced they are 'good drivers'...

~~~
mikeash
Right, the problem is self-awareness. You'd want to convince bad drivers that
they are bad, hoping this makes them try to improve.

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fiatjaf
Memory and imagination are linked, and they can be confused, but they are not
the same and can be distinguished by a trained mind.

~~~
dghf
What sort of training? What's the evidence it works? Do you have a link, or
can you provide more details?

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GoldenHomer
And those people are called white-guilt liberals.

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erikig
I'm going to send a link to this article to the MPAA, RIAA and my ISP the next
time the claim I was downloading/sharing something illegally.

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SandersAK
I don't understand. Didn't we know this already?

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23196385](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23196385)

Even further back from that, there have been studies where researches can do
this with children very easily.

~~~
bashinator
I don't understand what point you're trying to make. Is further research not
needed? Is there any reason not to continue to raise the level of awareness by
the general public to this phenomenon?

