Interviewer feedback in repeated interviews involving forced confabulation

Abstract

The effects of confirmatory interviewer feedback on eyewitness testimony following forcibly confabulated and accurate responses to repeated interview questions were investigated in two experiments. The first experiment showed that, relative to neutral feedback, confirmatory feedback provided after a forcibly confabulated response greatly increased the likelihood that participants would provide the same confabulated response when re-interviewed 2 days later, led participants to report these repeated confabulations with greater speed and fewer expressions of doubt, and increased the prevalence of false memories. Confirmatory interviewer feedback provided following accurate responses appeared to have more modest consequences for consistency and confidence, but ceiling effects provided little opportunity for observing potential effects. A second experiment showed that these effects of confirmatory feedback are of considerable practical significance, in that, regardless of their accuracy, responses that had earlier been reinforced with confirmatory feedback were much more likely to be judged by others as credible.

Confirmatory Interviewer Feedback in Suggestive Interviews Involving Forced Fabrications: Effects on the Accuracy of Later Free Recall

“…Further, the current study showed that this was especially likely when the forced fabrications had been reinforced by confirmatory interviewer feedback. As such, the present findings extend prior studies documenting that both forced fabrication and interviewer feedback increase false assents for item fabrications on 1-week recognition tests (Frost et al 2003(Frost et al , 2006;;Zaragoza et al 2001;Hanba and Zaragoza 2007), by demonstrating parallel effects with event fabrications incorporated into freely provided narrative accounts. One question raised by the current findings is whether participants might have refrained from reporting their fabrications if they had reason to suspect that they had been misled.…”

Confabulation: Implications for Criminal Justice, Forensic Mental Health, and Legal Professionals

“…Similar findings were reported by Clare and Gudjonsson in a sample of people with mild learning disabilities (mean IQ = 65) [71,72]. Specifically, these participants were more prone to suggestibility and confabulation relative to a comparison group with average intellectual abilities.…”

Registered report: The effects of incentivized lies on memory

“…expressed in a monotone voice for the details that did not occur in the video. The findings showed that confirmatory interviewer feedback not only led to false memories for confabulated items after a one-week delay, but also increased the participants' persistence and confidence in their false memories (Hanba & Zaragoza, 2007;Zaragoza et al, 2001). This suggests that there is a specific socialmotivational factor that can enhance the forced confabulation effect.…”