Any schoolteacher, or developmental psychologist, could tell you about Jean Piaget.  His most noteworthy contribution to science consisted of a model of intellectual development over the course of childhood.  The model broke down cognitive growth into four stages: (1) sensorimotor, (2) preoperational, (3) concrete operations, and (4) formal operations.  In the sensorimotor stage, a child’s primary thoughts center on control of the body and the exploration of the world through the senses.  It’s in this stage that a child learns to walk, distinguish sounds and colors and so on.  In the preoperational stage, the child develops a sense of self while she continues to master sensorimotor tasks.  During this stage of life (between two and seven), the child has yet to become acquainted with logical thinking, and tends to see the world as operating on a magical level (e.g., belief in the tooth fairy, the Easter Bunny, Father Christmas, and so on).  In the stage of concrete operations (ages seven to thirteen), children can grasp logical concepts, but only in a limited fashion.  They stop believing in “little kid stuff,” but at the same time can only understand things in a very black-and-white way, and can only apply their reasoning to things that they can directly experience.  (As my psyche professors often said, a number of people will never leave this stage of development, and remain will here to old age.)  The fourth level, formal operations (ages thirteen-on), is the adult thinking, the ability to apply logic to abstract concepts and critique principles; formal thinkers can even critique the value of logic itself.

Despite the fame of this model, Drs. Charles Brainerd and Valerie Reyna pay closer attention to Piaget’s work in another area: suggestibility.  Specifically, they point to his criticism of ‘mesmerization,’ a belief in the natural magnetic properties of animal life over inanimate matter.  Developed by physician Franz Mesmer, it eventually morphed into a crude form of hypnosis over the course of the Nineteenth Century.  Piaget’s take on this was that mesmerization, or hypnosis, worked on suggestibility.  In other words, the hypnotist has no power that the subject doesn’t forfeit to him or her.  Or, as noted neurologist Jean-Martin-Charcot said, hypnosis was itself “an induced hysteria--what doctors nowadays might refer to more formally as induced dissociation.

Suggestibility plays a key role in Brainerd and Reyna’s premise, because they believe that false memories come about through “spontaneous distortion processes,” or “autosuggestion.” 

Specifically, autosuggestion plays a larger role in the thought processes of children, precisely for the reasons alluded to by Piaget’s cognitive development model.  After all, if a child is prone to accept Santa Claus as a reality, then he or she can ascribe a number of different magical causes for observable effects, thus (according to Brainerd and Reyna) creating a false memory of causality.  They back this observation up with studies of what others called ‘the long-memory improvement effect.’* In these studies, children showed more accuracy in their memories after more time had elapsed.  This might, at first, seem counterintuitive.  After all, for most of us, the more time passes, the less we remember.  The authors concluded that for preoperational children, there is no memory of events because they simply cannot grasp the underlying logic behind events.  As Brainerd and Reyna wrote:

Piaget’s second, and more crucial prediction, is what Altemeyer, Fulton and Burney (1968) dubbed the long-memory improvement effect.  On the 8-month test, contrary to the commonsense prediction of forgetting-induced deterioration, the memory of children who were classified below the concrete-operational level should be better than on the 1-week test.  The reason is that many children will have made the logical concept that is necessary (according to Piaget) for accurate memory.

Children also have a tendency to believe what adults tell them, even if it runs contrary to their experience.  The authors make the rather commonsense observation that authority can skew the response of children, who tend to defer to adults’ version of events because they presume that they are more accurate than their own.  And even if they don’t assume that, there’s little they can do to clarify or champion such matters.  After all, they’re too busy struggling with their conceptual framework to challenge the confidence authority exudes.

The authors further illustrate the concept of suggestibility in children by quoting verbatim the very same transcriptions that I cited earlier, in the series on McMartin Preschool.  In this example, it should be clear to professional and layman alike that psychiatric social worker Kee McFarlane and pediatrician Dr. Astrid Heger’s aggressive questioning techniques coerced inaccurate responses from their preoperational interviewees.  Brainerd and Reyna cite Alfred Binet’s findings on memory distortion in explanation of events similar to what went on at McMartin:

On  basis of his findings, Binet (1900) offered four conclusions about false-memory reports that are still significant today.  First, he concluded that the memories of younger children, older children, and adults are all susceptible to memory distortion, whether by autosuggestion or by external misinformation, but that young children are most highly susceptible….Second, Binet concluded…that the nature of an interviewer’s language and the form of the questions that are posed can powerfully distort memory reports….Third, Binet interpreted his finding of a lack of relationship between confidence and accuracy as demonstrating once an erroneous response is given, it is incorporated into memory as a faithful representation of the original events…..  Fourth, Binet concluded that subjects, particularly children, were more susceptible to suggestion when tested in groups than when tested individually.

The McMartin children, for example, were often cited as the fundamental source of false information, even though most adults following the trial attributed this to the manner in which questions were put to them, thus illustrating Binet conclusions one and two.  Conclusions three and four, however, apply more generally to the public, and are more readily seen in adults.  Later in the book, the authors illustrated these conclusions by citing actual case studies.   But when we consciously make the distinction between memory and belief, one can demonstrate that Binet’s last two conclusions explain a lot about the behavior of the McMartin parents.

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*Drs. Robert Altemeyer, Daniel Fulton and Kent Berney did the initial study in 1968, which they published in a paper titled “Long-Term Memory Improvement,” appearing in vol. 3, n.4 (Sep 1969) of Child Development.