This study explored what happens when participants lie in order to convince others that false stories are true. Participants' memories were assessed by comparing their likelihood ratings for the events before and after lying about them. Results showed that most participants rated the events as less likely to have happened after lying about them. Therefore, the most common result of lying seems to be a strengthening of, not a distortion of, the truth. This decrease in likelihood rating for the statement lied about is termed 'fabrication deflation'. In both studies, however, there were 10-16% of the participants who indicated maximum belief that the lie item was true. Whether this increase in likelihood rating for a lied about event is evidence of memory creation or the triggering of an actual memory is discussed.
How do clinical observations of repression square with experimental evidence suggesting that emotionally arousing memories are especially enduring? This discrepancy can be understood by examining three kinds of memory distortions that give the impression in a clinical context, of repression. Potentially traumatic events such as childhood sexual abuse (CSA) may be subject to ordinary forgetting. Recent research suggests people who fail to understand the sexual nature of CSA report that they remember it less well. In other words, the event occurred and it was forgotten, but not “repressed.” In addition, people may be wrong about experiencing a period of forgetting, i.e. the event occurred but was never forgotten. Finally, people may believe that a particular traumatic event occurred and was repressed when, in fact, it did not happen in the first place. Under certain circumstances, some combination of these distortions could lead to situations that are mistakenly interpreted as repression.
This study investigated the effects of lying on belief ratings for autobiographical childhood events. Participants lied by trying to convince the experimenter that likely events had not happened and that unlikely events had happened. Participants consistently lied, consistently told the truth, and alternated lying and truth telling across two sessions. Results showed that consistent false assents increased belief in those false events and that consistent false denials decreased belief in those true events.False denials had a larger influence on belief than did false assents. False assents that were told first were more likely to increase in belief than were false assents told in the second session. False denials decreased belief in the true event regardless of when they were told. These results suggest that lying influences confidence ratings both by increasing belief in a lied-about event and by decreasing belief in a true event. created the details. Memory for cognitive operations, such as searching general knowledge stores, manipulating retrieved memories, elaborating, and imagining, suggests that the memory was internally generated rather than actually experienced. If liars remember the effort they put into fabricating their stories, these false stories may sound familiar; nevertheless, they should recognize that their stories were self-generated. The harder it is to fabricate details, the more likely one is to remember doing so (Otgaar & Baker, 2018). If the generation of the memory is easy, the self-generated source may be forgotten, and an inflation effect could occur.Previous research has identified many factors that affect one's ability to source monitor. Lying is presumed to be difficult and uses many cognitive resources (Langleben et al., 2002), so it should result in creating strong memories for the cognitive processes used to generate the lies. However, if a lie is repeated, the amount of cognitive effort used to lie decreases. Walczyk, Mahoney, Doverspike, and Griffith-Ross (2009) noted that response times were faster for prepared lies than for truthful responses because, after the lie had been practiced, the participants were simply delivering a memorized script.Lying becomes easier with repetition and, under some conditions, can be easier than telling the truth (Hu, Chen, & Fu, 2012). Therefore, as lying gets easier, the source-monitoring task becomes more difficult. Source monitoring will also be more difficult if the memory for the source has faded over time. Polage (2012) found that participants who lied during the same session as the posttest were less likely to increase their belief in the lies than participants who had lied in earlier sessions. It was assumed that memory for creating the lies was stronger for participants who had more recently generated the lies, making the source judgments easier.Based on previous research, it was proposed that false assents would increase belief in the false event. Repetition of the lie might increase its retrievability, inhibit the truth, and decrease sou...
Fraudulent emails, otherwise known as phishing emails, use a range of influence techniques to persuade individuals to respond, such as promising a monetary reward or invoking a sense of urgency. The current study explored a number of factors that may impact the persuasiveness and trustworthiness of emails by examining participant judgements of 20 pre-designed emails that varied according to (a) whether they used loss or reward-based influence techniques, (b) whether they contained particular authentic design cues, (c) whether they referenced a salient current event (the Rio Olympics), and (d) whether participants had been previously exposed to information regarding online scams in general. Results suggest that the presence of authentic design cues and the type of influence technique used significantly impacted participant judgements. Findings are discussed in relation to theoretical models of phishing susceptibility.
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