Understanding False Memories of Crime

Written by Dr Julia Shaw, host of Bad People on BBC Sounds.

False memories raise questions about how our memory works, whether we can accurately remember important life events, and the mainstream concept of repression.

On episode three of Bad People, Sofie Hagen and I discuss my work on false memories and a fascinating case involving a man who killed his own father.

The man, John, who wrote to me from prison, claimed that he had been taking care of his elderly father when a ‘red mist’ came over him. In that moment, he claims he remembered a history of being sexually abused by him and that this pushed him over the edge, leading him to take what felt like revenge and murder him. When John was caught shortly after the crime, he sat in the back of the police car saying “I watched my father die, it's great to be free. I watched him die in front of me.”

However, John has since retracted this accusation. He wrote to me stating that he had come to the conclusion that this memory had been false and no such abuse had happened. He believes he murdered his father because of a false memory. Is this possible? Can we have false memories of such terrible things?

False memories are memories of things that didn’t happen.

False memories are often patchworks of real memories – of real people, places, and emotions – pieced together in a way that never happened.

There are many things that memory scientists agree on when it comes to false memories, like that we can have false memories of entire events or of parts of events. We also agree that false memories are often patchworks of real memories – of real people, places, and emotions – pieced together in a way that never happened. There is also agreement that false memories can be complex and make us feel like we are reliving an emotional event, sometimes called “rich” false memories, or they can be more simple, like getting a fact wrong.

In my 2015 study I implanted rich false memories of committing crime. I had contacted the parents of my participants (university students) to get real information about their early teenage years. Then, I invited some of these participants to take part in a study on emotional memories. When they came in, participants were asked to remember one real event – that I had sourced from their parents – and one false event. The false event was created in a realistic way, using the name of the participants’ best friend at the time and the place they actually lived at that age.

I randomly assigned participants to remember either assaulting someone, assaulting someone with a rock, or stealing something. All three had supposedly been with ‘police contact’. At the end of the study 70% of my participants were classified as having rich false memories, often remembering many details of what happened, including their own emotions, thoughts, and sensations like smells, tastes, or sounds.

How? Through a combination of trust, misinformation, and imagination exercises. Repeatedly imagining how something could have happened is a powerful way to create false memories.

In 2020 I published a follow-up study, in which I showed videos of my 2015 study participants to people in the UK and Canada. These new participants couldn’t reliably tell the difference between people recalling true and false memories, supporting that false memories can look real.

Together with the larger body of research in this area, this research provides evidence that false memories can be of complex negative events, can feel real to those who have them, and can look real to others.

There is some disagreement as to how easily false memories can be created, how important and emotional false memories can be, and whether we can distinguish between false memories and false beliefs – but these are mostly academic arguments. You’d be hard pressed to find a memory scientist who doesn’t accept that people can have complex and emotional false memories. In real life, these can be created in a wide range of ways – including by therapists, via leading questions from police officers, or even something as simple as repeatedly telling a story which you knew to be untrue at the time, until you believe that it’s true.

But disagreement runs deeper for some and has led to a decades-long academic dispute known as the ‘memory wars’.

On one side, we have those fighting for therapeutic techniques to liberate traumatic memories from our subconscious. The battle rages with the other side, made up of researchers who warn that using such techniques can create false memories.

Memory researchers have long argued that these techniques can, instead of recovering real memories, lead to the implantation of false memories.

What are they fighting about? The concept of repression.

The idea that we can repress memories comes from Sigmund Freud. Freud proposed that sometimes when we experience traumatic, our mind buries memories of these events deep in our minds to keep us safe. How do we know if someone has a repressed memory, if they can’t access it? According to some, you can tell because these repressed memories cause all kinds of other mental health problems.

This, however, is not in line with scientific evidence. As Pathihis and colleagues wrote in 2013, in an article about the memory wars:

“Our skepticism… concerns the following scenario: A client enters therapy with psychological symptoms, such as those of depression or an eating disorder, and no memory of being abused, but following extended use of suggestive memory techniques (e.g., hypnosis, guided imagery, leading questions), remembers years of severe trauma. We know of no credible scientific evidence that memory works this way.”

It's precisely such situations where memory scientists argue that the assumption of repression can be dangerous.

Assuming that there must be a repressed trauma to uncover can lead therapists and other people to employ problematic techniques in an effort to ‘recover’ these alleged memories. Memory researchers have long argued that these techniques can, instead of recovering real memories, lead to the implantation of false memories.

We know from case studies that such situations have led some people to create impossible memories of horrific childhoods, including of satanic rituals and child sexual abuse which couldn’t have happened.

In research I published with Annelies Vredeveldt in 2018, we argued that the memory wars continue in Europe, and that the idea of repression is still alive and may well be contributing to false memories of abuse.

I’m not trying to argue that therapy which uses memory recovery, or therapists that assume memories are repressed, always create false memories.

The problem is that once assumptions have been made, and problematic recovery methods have been used, it’s just really difficult to know if a memory is true or false. And, as my research has recently shown, people struggle to distinguish rich false memories of committing crime and other emotional events from real memories. False memory accounts can be as emotional, detailed and realistic as someone describing an event that actually happened.

This doesn’t always matter within a therapeutic context, but it matters hugely if memory is used as the primary or only evidence during a criminal trial. This is also precisely why criminal psychologists are so interested in false memories.

On a more subtle level, the assumption that just because something was important or emotional we must have a memory of it somewhere if we dig hard enough, is also problematic for police interviewing of suspects and witnesses.

We forget lots of things, emotional memories are no exception. To assume otherwise is to risk creating false memories.

The concept of repression is about 100 years old.

Just as science has advanced our understanding of the body and revolutionised medicine over the past 100 years, psychological science has advanced our understanding of the mind and revolutionised psychotherapy. These advances have taught us to be careful when it comes to our memories, and sceptical of beliefs that are not evidence-based.

What about John? Are his memories false? How did he find himself murdering his own father? Listen to episode three of Bad People on BBC Sounds to find out.

Dr Julia Shaw is a research associate at University College London and the co-host of the Bad People podcast on BBC sounds. She is an expert on criminal psychology, and the author of two international bestsellers “Making Evil: The Science Behind Humanity’s Dark Side” and “The Memory Illusion: Remembering, Forgetting, and the Science of False Memory.

Her website: www.drjuliashaw.com, and twitter @drjuliashaw