More Lies Lead to More Memory Impairments in Daily Life

Abstract

Previous studies have demonstrated that lying can undermine memory and that its memory-undermining effects could be modulated by the cognitive resources required to tell lies. We extended the investigation of the memory-undermining effect by using a daily life setting in which participants were highly involved in a mock shopping task. Participants were randomly assigned to truth-telling, denying or mixed lying conditions. After finishing the shopping task, participants were told that two people wanted to know about their shopping lists and would ask them some questions in an interview. During the interview, participants were asked whether each of ten items were on the shopping list, five of which were randomly selected from the shopping list, while the other five were not sold in the store. In answering the interview questions, the truth-telling group was asked to respond honestly, the denying group was asked to give denial responses, and the mixed lying group was asked to respond deceptively. Thus, the denying group told five lies and the mixed lying group told ten lies in the interview. The item memory test, source memory test and destination memory test were given in an orderly manner 48 h after the interview. We found that the mixed lying group, rather than the denying group, forgot the lies they told in the interview and mistakenly believed they had lied about something that they had not lied about. Moreover, the mixed lying group retained fewer memories about the person they responded to than the honest group. In addition, participants in the mixed lying group had more non-believed memories than those in the truth-telling group in both item and source memory tests. We conclude that more lies could result in more memory disruptions in daily life.

The effect of lying on memory in daily life: Does motivation matter?

“…As indicated in the results section, the results achieved on the final memory test did not consider items erroneously replied to during the interview. We found that lying undermined both source and destination memory, which is consistent with previous studies (Li et al, 2022a , 2022b ; Li & Liu, 2021 ). Moreover, we did not observe any significant differences between the internally and externally motivated lying groups.…”

“…Following previous studies (Li et al, 2022a , 2022b ; Li & Liu, 2021 ), all data were analyzed in the R system with the lme 4 package. A linear mixed‐effects (LMEs) model was used to analyze the belief and memory ratings, and a generalized linear mixed‐effects (GLMEs) model was used to analyze error rates, with participants and items serving as crossed random effects (Baayen et al, 2008 ).…”

“…Following previous studies (Li et al, 2022a(Li et al, , 2022bLi & Liu, 2021), a daily life paradigm that contained two sessions was used in the present study.…”

“…Given that memory and emotion are interrelated (Bisby et al, 2016;Phelps, 2004) and that memory might be influenced by working memory (Gerrie & Garry, 2007;Peters et al, 2007), the current study evaluated both emotion and working memory. Based on previous studies (Li et al, 2022a(Li et al, , 2022bLi & Liu, 2021), we hypothesized that emotion and working memory would play no role in the present study.…”

“…To further explore and validate the effects of deception on beliefs and memories (Battista, Mangiulli, et al, 2021 ; Li et al, 2022a ), the present study assessed the beliefs and memories of each test entry and hypothesized that they could be affected by deceptive behavior. To evaluate the impact of internally and externally motivated lying on memory, the differences in memory test results among the groups were compared.…”