from Hacker News

People Can Be Convinced They Committed a Crime That Never Happened

by albanlv on 1/16/15, 4:27 PM with 66 comments

• by dsugarman on 1/16/15, 11:10 PM

  There is a bagel place near where I grew up that had a strange link to a double homicide. Basically one partner owed another partner half a million dollars and the owed partner, along with his wife, wound up dead. The other partner faked his death and fled to California. The police arrested the murdered couple's son and convinced him that he killed his own parents, threw him in jail and locked away the key. It was 17 years before he would be let free of crimes virtually everyone in the community knew he did not commit.

  [1]http://murderpedia.org/male.T/t/tankleff-martin.htm [2]http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/nyregion/01tankleff.html?g...

• by cehrnrooth on 1/16/15, 11:42 PM

  There was a great article in the New Yorker about police interrogation techniques and how they can influence people to confess to crimes (and the studies that explain why people would falsely confess).

  [1]http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/09/the-interview-7

• by dghf on 1/16/15, 11:08 PM

  Is convincing people they committed a crime really ethical? My self-image as a pretty peaceable, pretty honest person is fairly important to me: if I suddenly "remembered" a time when I stole from or attacked someone (with a weapon, no less) I'd be certainly upset, possibly traumatised.

  Can anyone really give meaningful consent for an exercise like this? They paid the participants $50, but presumably they couldn't tell them exactly what was going on, or it wouldn't have worked.

• by LinaLauneBaer on 1/17/15, 3:33 PM

  One more reason to not talk to the police... Relevant explanation by an expert: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc

• by toddrew on 1/18/15, 1:02 AM

  We played a trick on my friend Jerry that I worked with in the military. The previous night we had a few drinks and then called it a night and walked home together.

  Jerry, in the morning mentioned to someone that his shoulder really hurt, but he couldn't remember hurting it.

  We came up with a plan that morning to convince Jerry that he had been sideswiped by a taxi, and got into a fight with a taxi driver. We emailed everyone we were with the night before, explained to them what we were doing, and started planting that idea in Jerry's mind.

  At first he claimed that it never happened. He kept saying he knew we were just fucking with him.

  More and more people corroborated the story. We even had a military police officer call him on the phone to inquire about the incident. We got his boss to sit him down and have a talk with him about his problem with alcohol (he doesn't drink that much).

  Eventually as the story was repeated to him by everyone, especially people with authority, Jerry went from:

  "this never happened.. I only had two beer last night" to: "hmm... maybe I was really drunk after all... but I don't remember anything" to: "Yeah... I remember everything now! How could I have forgotten before? Crazy!?!?"

  He turned our story into real memories and even started adding his own details to the story. We thought that was hilarious.

  That night we all got together and told Jerry that it was all just a joke. He couldn't believe it. He argued with us that he was sure it did happen. He remembered it. When he finally accepted it he felt really dumb, but it was a really fun day at work for us, so definitely worth it.

• by Joeri on 1/17/15, 10:53 AM

  This happens conversely as well, where the person would remember a rosy version of events in which they themselves acted quite badly in actuality. Just because a person believes they did not do something bad doesn't mean they didn't. It has led me to automatically put into doubt stories people tell me that I did not witness myself.

• by kazinator on 1/17/15, 4:54 PM

  If false memories can be planted in those who are accused, it can be done to witnesses too, so that they swear that the shriveled nonagenarian in the courtroom is the same person as the guard in that Nazi camp more than sixty years ago.

• by jonsen on 1/16/15, 11:23 PM

  Reminds me of the excellent movie Under Suspicion

  http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_Suspicion_(2000_film)

• by spiritplumber on 1/17/15, 1:54 AM

  This is the most Kafkian thing I've read all day.

• by rbrogan on 1/16/15, 11:42 PM

  "The fact that the students appeared to internalize the false events to the extent that they did highlights the fundamental malleability of memory"

  Is it true that the memories themselves are false or is it the remembering process that is influenced to produce false beliefs about what happened?

• by pknerd on 1/17/15, 6:46 PM

  Oh it can be sumup in a single word,Politics

• by Zelphyr on 1/17/15, 12:19 AM

  Makes me wonder if this might be put to more productive use. Like, convincing people that they don't habitually talk during movies thus making them stop?

• by fiatjaf on 1/17/15, 3:34 AM

  Memory and imagination are linked, and they can be confused, but they are not the same and can be distinguished by a trained mind.

• by GoldenHomer on 1/17/15, 4:02 AM

  And those people are called white-guilt liberals.

• by erikig on 1/17/15, 3:00 AM

  I'm going to send a link to this article to the MPAA, RIAA and my ISP the next time the claim I was downloading/sharing something illegally.

• by SandersAK on 1/16/15, 11:46 PM

  I don't understand. Didn't we know this already?

  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23196385

  Even further back from that, there have been studies where researches can do this with children very easily.