The impact of ego-involvement in the creation of false childhood memories

Abstract

An experiment employed a 'familiar-informant false-narrative procedure' to examine the effects of ego involvement manipulation on the creation of false memories for suggested events. Our main sample consisted of 54 Serbian adolescent students. During the pre-testing stage, students' parents (N=54) provided details from their children childhoods, which were used to create stimuli for the subsequent stages. Half of the participants were given an ego-involving suggestion- a short written statement that claimed that people with higher intelligence have a better and more detailed memory of their childhood. We hypothesized that ego-involved group would recollect more childhood events in general, create more false memories and be more confident in its' authenticity and clarity. Implanted event was recognized as autobiographic by 24% respondents in the testing stage and by 44.4% respondents in the retesting stage. There were significant qualitative differences between authentic and false memories: authentic memories were assessed as more reliable and clearer than the false ones. Ego-involvement manipulation had no impact on the frequency or quality of false memories reported by the participants. Even though the specific ego-involvement manipulation was not successful, our findings suggest that other motivating strategies we employed pushed the respondents into accepting false memory suggestion in the retesting stage. Future research could benefit from testing more elaborate ego-involving procedures.