Invitation to Psychology

274 ChaPteR 8 Memory

teacher, or spilling punch all over the mother of

the bride at a wedding (Hyman & Pentland, 1996;

Lindsay et al., 2004; Loftus & Pickrell, 1995;

Mazzoni et al., 1999). When people were shown a

phony Disneyland ad featuring Bugs Bunny, about

16 percent later recalled having met a Bugs char-

acter at Disneyland (Braun, Ellis, & Loftus, 2002).

Some people even claimed to remember shaking

hands with the character, hugging him, or seeing

him in a parade. But these memories were impos-

sible, because Bugs Bunny is a Warner Brothers

creation and would definitely be rabbit non grata

at Disneyland!

Watch the Video Thinking Like a Psychologist:

Police Line-Up at MyPsychLab

Children’s Testimony LO 8.4

The power of suggestion can affect anyone, but

its impact on children who are being questioned

regarding possible sexual or physical abuse is es-

pecially worrisome.

How can adults find

out whether a young

child has been sexu-

ally molested without

influencing or taint-

ing what the child

says? The answer is

crucial. Throughout

the 1980s and 1990s, accusations of child abuse

in daycare centers across the United States sky-

rocketed. After being interviewed by therapists

and police investigators, children were claiming

that their teachers had molested them in the most

terrible ways: hanging them in trees, raping them,

and even forcing them to eat feces. Although in no

case had parents actually seen the daycare teach-

ers treating the children badly, although none

of the children had complained to their parents,

and although none of the parents had noticed

any symptoms or problems in their children, the

accused teachers were often sentenced to many

years in prison.

Thanks largely to research by psychologi-

cal scientists, the hysteria eventually subsided

and people were able to assess more clearly

what had gone wrong in the way children had

been interviewed in these cases: The interview-

ers had influenced the children by bombarding

them with leading questions, suggestions, and

other forms of pressure to say that something

happened when it did not (Ceci & Bruck, 1995).

In the courtroom, too, the style of questions

put to children under cross-examination often

leads them to be highly inaccurate (O’Neill &

Zajac, 2012). The question to ask, therefore, is

not “Can children’s memories be trusted?” but

“Under what conditions are children apt to be

suggestible and to report that something hap-

pened to them when in fact it did not?”

The answer, from many experimental stud-

ies, is that a child is more likely to give a false

report when the interviewer strongly believes

that the child has been molested and then uses

suggestive techniques to get the child to reveal

FiguRE 8.1 The influence of Misleading information

In a study described in the text, students saw the face of a young man with straight hair and then had to reconstruct

it from memory. On the left is one student’s reconstruction in the absence of misleading information about the man’s

hair. On the right is another person’s reconstruction of the same face after exposure to misleading information that

mentioned curly hair (Loftus & Greene, 1980).

Children’s Testimony

Testimony

Thinking

CriTiCally