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memory
You can remember events that never actually happened.
Leading questions can bias eyewitness testimony and retrospectively influence how events are reported.
Whether these questions cause a permanent alteration of the original memory trace, or simply overlay a new memory, remains a subject of active debate in cognitive psychology.
Your memory is not a recording, but a story you keep rewriting.
Where this comes from
- Study
- Loftus and Palmer (1974)
- What the check found
- Loftus and Palmer (1974) demonstrated that leading questions alter estimates and witness responses, but whether this constitutes a permanent erasure or alteration of the original memory trace is a theoretical interpretation, not an empirical fact.
- Confidence
- Solid, with limits
Related
One of these every day, and every one names the study it came from. When a finding is contested, it says so.