Although Drs. Charles Brainerd and Valerie Reyna felt that children were more easily manipulated through suggestion, they gave a number of examples of adult manipulation through suggestibility in their book The Science of False Memory. They demonstrated that the same factors that create malleable testimony in youngsters also apply to grown-ups through a number of case studies.

One study they cited dealt with the question of autosuggestion, the one's tendency to manipulate his or her thoughts in deference to an overriding belief structure:

Conway and associates…have exploited this methodology to considerable advantage in some informative studies of autobiographical false memory. In the cited article, for example, two subjects, both of whom were memory researchers, kept diaries over a period of 5 months. They made diary entries for a total of 147 days, with the entries for each day being recorded either late in the evening or early the following morning. The subjects were instructed to make entries for both personal experiences and news events of the day. Diary entries for individual days were roughly six or seven sentences in length. In addition to recording true events and thoughts, subjects were asked to record altered events and thoughts and false events and thoughts. Altered events and thoughts were generated by the subjects themselves by modifying the surface form of a true event or thought while preserving its meaning….False events and thoughts were things that could have happened on a particular day, but did not.*

According to Brainerd and Reyna, suggestibility is often in deference to authority. In one example, a transcript of a legal proceeding, they illustrate not only that you can manipulate adult memory through suggestion, but that you can do so quite easily, and with almost instantaneous results.

Officer: Where’d you guys eat lunch on Saturday?

Witness: Don’t remember.

Officer: Really?

Witness: Just can’t recall.

Officer: Well, I talked to your brother’s wife, and she said that you guys ate a lunch at Burger King.”

Witness: She said that?

Officer: Yeah.

Witness: Yup, I remember now. It was Burger King.

Officer: You certain of that?

Witness: Absolutely.

The authors add, ““The indicated conversation with the brother’s wife, which led this witness to ‘remember’ with absolute certainty that he and his brother ate at Burger King, never occurred.”

From this, one can only surmise that the memory was created by the court officer during questioning, using not only his authority as, well, a court officer, but also on the authority of his sister-in-law. This jibes with third and fourth conclusion drawn by Alfred Binet (cited in previous post). The confidence exuded by the witness that he actually ate at Burger King has no bearing on whether or not he actually ate at Burger King, since the memory was apparently induced by an outside party (namely, the examining attorney). At the same time, bringing the witness’ sister-in-law into the picture expands the pool of people who can definitely place him at Burger King that Saturday. The witness now has a court officer AND a relative placing him there. Although two is the smallest group possible, we can see that plurality gives weight to the validity of a proposition.

More directly bearing on the subject of false memory in forensic examination (especially as it pertains to child abuse), the authors also cite case studies of false confessions. In one, “The Case of Mr. K,” an engineer with two kids, nine and eleven, his sons invited a friend over, who consequently complained that Mr. K fondled his genitalia.

The investigators then proceeded to Mr. K’s house to interview his wife, who also reported no knowledge of the events complained of by Mrs. L’s son. They did learn, however, that Mr. K was a heavy drinker, who was in a state of moderate intoxication during most evenings, who had been encouraged to seek medical treatment for his drinking problem, and who had been drinking on the previous evening.

.....further investigation revealed that a parent had filed a complaint four years earlier that another woman complained that Mr. K fondled the buttocks of her son. Police asked him to come to the station a second time. After grilling, and noting his alcoholic tendencies, he said ‘Well, I suppose I can’t be 100% sure that it didn’t happen….I was so blotto that maybe I can’t rule it out completely, but I sure don’t think anything like that could happen….Yeah, the boy hadn’t been drinking and I had been, so I suppose his memory of Sunday night would have to be clearer than mine.’

Here, Mr. K. has a debilitation (alcoholism) that could lead to memory blackouts. The fact that someone previously filed a charge against him, the fact that he knew he didn’t remember everything, compounded by the authority of police officers led him to speculate that he very well could have done exactly what they said he did.

In another case, Mr. E., a man characterized by the authors as “slightly retarded,” accidentally killed his infant son when he picked up the crying baby to comfort him, and then tripped over something with the kid still in his arms.

Mr. E stated in response to the researcher’s questioning that although he was sure that he could not have done such terrible things, some of the events seemed quite real to him, both at the time of the police interrogation and at the time of the forensic interview. This was particularly true of the alleged motive for the crime: being very angry toward his wife for leaving him alone with the infant when he was in a state of sleep deprivation. He further stated that at the time of the interrogation, he thought that the police interviewer’s knowledge of events must be far more accurate than his own memory and that, even now, he would be inclined to believe that some of the acts of brutality happened if it were not for the fact that he knew himself to be incapable of such savagery.

After his arrest on murder charges:  "As he was taken to his cell, he complained to the attendant that the interviewer had put words into his mouth and that he had not harmed his son, which the attendant duly noted.”

Compelling forensic evidence demonstrated that Mr. E. and his child had suffered a horrendous accident, and nothing else. So despite his confession, he was released. Likewise, authorities found Mr. K. innocent. Therefore, there confessions had to have been false. The authors subsequently infer that their memories of the events were likewise false.

Bearing even more directly on the subject of recovered memories of sexual childhood abuse, Drs. Brainerd and Reyna cited the case of Dr. Diane Humenansky, a psychiatrist who suddenly found herself surrounded by patients suffering from Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). One of these patients, Elizabeth Carlson, sued Humenansky for malpractice, stating that these multiple personalities, which included memories of Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA), had no basis in fact, but instead were planted into consciousness by the doctor’s suggestion. Commenting on this case, Brainerd and Reyna stated:

During the initial trial, [Dr. Diane] Humenansky [M.D.] testified that she did not believe that patients could recover false memories of sexual abuse; she did not believe in the phenomenon of false memory; and her patients’ recovered memories were therefore true. However, the presiding judge ruled that the psychological theory upon which recovered-memory therapy is based--the theory of repression--does not meet an accepted standard of scientific proof and that, in consequence, expert testimony that assumes the validity of this notion could not be presented at trial. Following a 6-week trial, the jury awarded the plaintiff more than $2.6 million for medical expenses, loss of income, pain, and suffering. The patient was awarded a further $461,000 for anticipated future damages, and her husband was awarded 210,000 for loss of partnership.**

Drs. Brainerd and Reyna summarized many of the arguments made by the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, and sympathetic researchers. While not exactly defining false memory, or clarifying what it is as opposed to what it isn’t, the researchers nevertheless present a convincing case, based on the fact that memory is fallible, and subject to such things as suggestion (from authorities, peers, or the subject herself), coercion (in the case of false confessions), or just overall deficiency in how we remember things. They contended that false memories are common, everyday occurrences, that affect all aspects of remembrance. Moreover, they said that others–perhaps due to maliciousness, perhaps due to incompetence–can easily plant false memories in a subject.

At the same time, many experts have expressed grave doubts to these and similar findings based on a number of factors. To them, the evidence cited by Drs. Brainerd and Reyna neither proves the existence of false memory, nor addresses the matter of recovered memory, especially in cases of trauma. Instead, these studies and this evidence indicates something that’s a bit more complex.

______________________
*The authors appear to be citing a number of studies simultaneously, here, those conducted by Dr. M.A. Conway, and others not conducted by him, but done by others who presumably had some professional relationship to Dr. Conway in the field of autobiographical memory.  The actual study cited here was done by Dr. Craig R. Barclay (University of Rochester), and Dr. Henry Wellman (University of Michigan), and published under the title “Accuracies and Inaccuracies in Autobiographical Memory” (Journal of Memory and Language, 1987).    

**Without delving deeply into the case against Dr. Humenansky, or the reasons for the judge to disallow testimony obtained through recovered memory, many would point out that courts have ruled in favor of the admissibility of such evidence because it meets the requirements of the Daubert standard. Some experts say that whether or not the court accepts recovered memory as evidence could depend on the jurisdiction, the nature of the statute of limitations, the specific expert witness, or court officers involved.