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Comparing the Effectiveness of Six Methods of Misinformation Delivery

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Comparing the Effectiveness of Six Methods of Misinformation Delivery The medium and the message: Comparing the effectiveness of six methods of misinformation delivery in an eyewitness memory paradigm Ciara M. Greene1*, Richard Bradshaw1, Charlotte Huston2 & Gillian Murphy2 1 School of Psychology, University College Dublin, Ireland 2 School of Applied Psychology, University College Cork, Ireland *Corresponding author. Please send correspondence to [email protected] Data availability: The data and materials associated with this paper may be found at https://osf.io/vgqw4/. This paper is currently in press at the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied 1 Abstract Studies of eyewitness memory commonly employ variations on a standard misinformation paradigm. Participants are 1) exposed to an event (e.g. a simulated crime), 2) misled about certain details of the event and 3) questioned about their memory of the original event. Misinformation may be provided in the second step via a range of methods. Here, we directly compared the effectiveness of six misinformation delivery methods – leading questions, elaborate leading questions, doctored photographs, simple narratives, scrambled narratives, and missing word narratives. We presented 1182 participants with a video of a simulated robbery and randomly assigned them to receive misinformation about two out of four critical details via one of these methods. In line with the levels of processing account of memory, we report that methods that encourage deeper processing of misinformation result in more memory distortions. Contrary to previous reports, doctored photographs were not a successful method of implanting misinformation. The six delivery methods resulted in minimal differences in confidence and metamemory estimates, but participants were more likely to notice the presence of misinformation in the simple narrative condition. We conclude with suggestions for the selection of an appropriate method of misinformation delivery in future studies. Public Significance Statement Decades of research has shown that providing an eyewitness with inaccurate information about a crime that they witnessed can distort their memory and future testimony. This study compares the effect of six different methods of delivering this misinformation to an eyewitness. The results of this study will benefit researchers in this field, and provide important evidence about how exposure to different kinds of information after witnessing a crime can influence an eyewitness in the real world. Keywords: Misinformation; eyewitness memory; levels of processing; leading questions; doctored photographs 2 3 INTRODUCTION Decades of research have demonstrated that memory for experienced events can be distorted by the provision of post-event misinformation (Frenda et al., 2011). Evidence for this misinformation effect has been demonstrated in a range of experimental paradigms, however a typical study follows a three-part procedure. First, participants are exposed to an initial stimulus – for example, a video or slideshow depicting a crime. Next, misinformation is presented, often in the form of leading questions or a misleading narrative description of the initial event. Finally, the participant is asked to report details of the original event, usually via a questionnaire or interview. Studies employing this paradigm frequently find that participants report elements of the misinformation during the final memory test (Loftus, 2005). The source monitoring framework (Johnson et al., 1993; Mitchell & Johnson, 2000) provides one account of how misinformation influences memory. According to this model, individuals evaluate the perceptual and semantic characteristics of mental experiences in order to infer the source of the experience. For example, if someone has merely imagined an event, there will often be limited temporal, spatial and semantic information associated with the memory, while the opposite is true of lived experiences. In the context of false memories like those created in misinformation studies, this source monitoring process fails; individuals attribute the semantic, perceptual or emotional characteristics arising from one source to another, incorrect source (Lindsay & Johnson, 2000; Zaragoza & Lane, 1994). One important determinant of the likelihood of source monitoring errors is the similarity between different sources. Where there is considerable overlap between sources – for example, between a witnessed event and the post-event description of it – source misattributions may be more likely (Mitchell & Johnson, 2000). If the degree to which individuals experience source confusion depends in part on the nature of the post-event source, it becomes important to consider the means by which misinformation is delivered to participants. 4 Misinformation delivery methods Early studies of the misinformation effect typically used leading questions to deliver post-event information (e.g. Dodd & Bradshaw, 1980; Loftus, 1975; Loftus et al., 1978; Loftus & Palmer, 1974). A notable example of this can be found in a study by Loftus et al. (1978) in which participants viewed a slide showing a car stopped at a Yield sign. Having been exposed to the misleading question, “Did another car pass the red Datsun while it was stopped at the Stop sign?”, many participants later affirmed that the initial slide showed a Stop sign. The aim of these studies was often to demonstrate that hints and assumptions embedded in an investigator’s question could influence the responses of eyewitnesses to real-world crimes; see Loftus (2005) for an overview of much of this research. In other studies, misinformation is delivered via a narrative account of the event that contains misleading descriptions of the initial stimulus (e.g. McCloskey & Zaragoza, 1985). Typically, participants in these studies are instructed to respond to subsequent questions with reference to their memory of the initial stimulus, rather than the post-event narrative, and are sometimes explicitly informed that the narrative may be misleading. Participants who subsequently report memories of having experienced stimuli that were in fact only suggested to them can therefore be considered to have experienced source confusion (Zaragoza & Lane, 1994). Narratives are sometimes presented in the form of newspaper accounts of a crime (e.g. Paterson & Kemp, 2006), or are introduced as the testimony of another witness to the event (Gabbert et al., 2004; Meade & Roediger, 2002). In some cases, participants are simply required to read or listen to this misleading narrative (Eakin et al., 2003; Echterhoff et al., 2007; Greene et al., 2020; Stark et al., 2010; Zhu, Chen, Loftus, Lin, He, Chen, Li, Xue, et al., 2010); in others, they are required to engage more deeply with the material, for example by rearranging a scrambled narrative into chronological order (Jaschinski & Wentura, 2002; Luna & Martín‐ Luengo, 2012; Zaragoza & Lane, 1994, Experiment 2). 5 Altered photographs of a witnessed event or scene are another commonly-used form of misinformation. Photographs provide a visual image of the misinformation, and may therefore have considerable perceptual overlap with the memory of the original event. This source similarity might be expected to produce a greater rate of source misattributions (Johnson et al., 1993; Mitchell & Johnson, 2000), and indeed, evidence suggests that the closer misinformation becomes to the qualities of a real memory, the more fluently it will be recalled and accepted (Garry & Gerrie, 2005; Nash et al., 2009; Whittlesea, 1993). Viewing photographs of a scene makes people believe they have been there before when they visit for the first time (Brown & Marsh, 2008), and presenting photographs of an action that participants had only imagined completing resulted in an increase in participants ‘remembering’ having actually completed the action (Henkel & Carbuto, 2008; Nash et al., 2009). Similarly, participants who watched a video of an event and then viewed photographs of the scene that included items that were not present in the original video were more likely to falsely remember having seen those items in the video (Koutstaal et al., 1999; Schacter et al., 1997). Research suggests misinformation is more likely to be accepted if it comes from a credible source (Dodd & Bradshaw, 1980; French et al., 2011; Scoboria et al., 2012). Photos are unique compared to other media in their apparent provision of ‘proof’ that the depicted event actually occurred; despite individuals’ awareness of how easily photographs can be altered, they are often viewed as a particularly credible form of evidence (Nash, 2018). An example of this is seen in the so-called ‘truthiness’ effect, whereby the inclusion of a non-probative photograph increases belief in inaccurate information (Fenn et al., 2013; Newman et al., 2012). Recent advances in digital photographic editing technology have allowed researchers to present participants with doctored photographs from their childhood, showing, for example, the participant taking a ride in a hot-air balloon with a relative. These methods have been found to result in a high rate of false memories for the fabricated event (Strange et al., 2008; Strange et al., 2006; Wade et al., 2002). Similar methods 6 have demonstrated the power of doctored images to produce false memories of public events (Frenda et al., 2013; Nash, 2018; Sacchi et al., 2007). Perhaps surprisingly then, research has suggested that misleading narratives may produce more false memories than doctored photographs. Garry and Wade (2005) exposed participants
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