People can be convinced they committed a crime that never happened (2015) | Hacker News Reader

People can be convinced they committed a crime that never happened (2015)

psychologicalscience.org

320 pointsQuinzel201 comments

Interesting that the entire article had nothing to mention about the Reid technique [1]. The Reid technique has been used by law enforcement to convince criminals of confessions. Many confessions were found to be false. In the book by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson [2], they cover false confessions in depth with a few court cases, as well as police techniques to invoke cognitive dissonance in the accused. Callout to the book though, for self-deception and cognitive dissonance is something that affects us all!

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reid_technique [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistakes_Were_Made_(but_Not_by...

I took a cursory look through the Reid technique.

It's literally just modern gaslighting.

Well, it's a highly developed and systematized form of gaslighting. A significant technological advancement over the common amateur gaslighting.

Like the machinegun isn't just another musket.

Consider the progress of technology in the field of lying, bullshit and propaganda.

We've been developing that stuff for literally thousands of years. It has surely been refined to such a height as to be nigh-perfectly secret, invisible and powerful.

It's a good thing it isn't used against the population at scale, huh.

Are you sure?

That is exactly what they were implying.

Pretty illuminating that the origin story of the technique is it eliciting what was later revealed as a false confession that sentenced an innocent man to life in prison.

Wouldn't that be considered evidence of techniques usefulness?

> The Reid technique has been used by law enforcement to convince criminals of confessions. Many confessions were found to be false.

This is one reason among many why it is a serious question to ask whether a confession increases or actually rather decreases the likelihood that the culprit commited the crime.

That only matters if the truth is a major consideration. Some theories of justice don't care, as long as social order is maintained.

Which theories of justice? What countries are practicing this supposed theory?

Because this greater good thing sounds earily similar like the end justifies the means, which could argue for decimating a whole village to catch criminals as long as "overall social order of a larger group is contained".

I think most countries practice some form of "order is better than truth", including the US. There are famous examples of US courts rejecting arguments on the basis that "just because you have proof that you were wrongly convicted doesn't give you standing to appeal".

Cardassians. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribunal_(Star_Trek:_Deep_Sp...

> as long as social order is maintained

That would rely on the participants believing that truth is the major consideration, right?

If I knew that I would have to prove my innocence, that would lead to a lot of overhead for self surveillance and documentation.

Ie. If the custom of just accepting false confessions becomes a widely accepted practice it could potentially lead to reduction of social order.

Not really. Lots of societies have required accused criminals to be tortured until they confess. Presumably they would generally only torture people they believed were guilty, but there was no reason to be more confident the person was guilty after confession than before. The confession was purely of ritual significance.

> Presumably they would generally only torture people they believed were guilty,

so in their system of belief, they are truthfully guilty.

the question I am asking is whether you can divorce truth from confession.

if the society cannot believe that a confessing person is indeed guilty, then it will not uphold societal order.

Gladiatorial combat was used to help preserve the social order. Public executions were often just that but skipping the combat part, and people would often cheer them on like a football game.

You'd be surprised how little people care about innocence and justice. They care more about the entertainment value and reddit drama of discussing the convictions than actual justice or truth.

People want to hear that bad things are being done to "bad people", and won't interrogate that label too deeply.

I think the point is believe.

I agree that it takes just little to believe anything. But my point is that we can not divorce the belief

In the US, a claim of actual innocence based on new evidence is not sufficient to reopen a death penalty conviction, so long as the court case was performed fairly.

The argument for this, as ugly as it is, is that admitting arguments of innocence at that point would clog up the court system and impede justice.

Here's a good article about it. Scalia's claim was in the dissent, so this isn't established legal doctrine in the US, and the Supreme Court has in fact ruled in favor of the convicted on more than one occasion, but as the article shows it has actually happened as practiced legal doctrine in at least one case.

https://ohrh.law.ox.ac.uk/justice-antonin-scalias-rebuke-of-...

Scalia joined the majority in Herrera v. Collins, where innocence could not be used to justify a Habeas claim.

Reading that it's specific to an 8th amendment claim.

It definitely is horrific. It looks like further Supreme Court cases allowed actual innocence claims under other standards, or for specific types of evidence. All of these were close decisions though, and I fear what a more 'conservative' court will allow.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_v._Bell

Scalia's concurrence was focused on the 8th, but the case presented both 8th and 14th amendment arguments for allowing habeas.

Schlup was two years later, but searching just now I guess it isn't that strong of a protection:

https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/schlup-v...

> Although this is a correct ruling, the Court's opinion is not likely to significantly protect innocent people from being executed. First, the Court failed to recognize key points of distinction between the evidence of innocence that Schlup presented and the evidence of innocence presented in Herrera v. Collins. Because Schlup's evidence was much stronger, the Court should not have ruled on the issue of whether the Constitution bars the execution of a factually innocent person. The implication of the Court's silence is that full habeas hearings are unavailable on straight-forward constitutional claims of actual innocence. Second, the Court's analysis of the fundamental miscarriage of justice exception does not appear to contradict the argument that the exception is a rule of permission. Thus, after Schlup, Federal courts will likely be free to dismiss the habeas petitions of State prisoners even where new evidence of innocence makes it "more likely than not that no reasonable juror would have convicted."

That's not the only argument the majority made in Herrera. Habeas corpus is a specifically protected right by the Constitution. The argument wasn't just "this is impractical." The argument was "a guilty conviction that sentences a person to death is not a violation of habeas corpus even if you are actually innocent and we all agree that they are innocent".

As I understand it, a claim of actual innocence based on new evidence that would have led no "reasonable jury" to convict is entertained, assuming that all procedural appeals were not exhausted.

In Herrera, a majority of the jurors in the original case said they would not have voted to convict if the new evidence had been available.

If you're being interrogated by the police, you've already lost. The only word you should say is "lawyer."

Here's what the ideal interrogation looks like: https://youtube.com/watch?v=6RoKvC1qcEY

Specifically "I want a lawyer", not "I want a lawyer dog"

Law Enforcement has an alignment problem?

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

This seems like a bit of a leap to assume that this is about malleability rather than just lying to researchers and saying what they feel is expected. I could very easily imagine myself playing along with someone trying to convince me of false memories just because I don't want to put up a fight against someone who is gaslighting me.

Speaking of which, how is gaslighting students considered ethical research?

Well this is just the latest of many studies suggesting memory is extremely malleable and suggestible.

If the studies are based on asking people if they remember the false event, they are susceptible to the same critique.

I recall studies (...unless my recollection is a false memory!) where the subjects didn't know they were in an experiment.

For example in one I remember the researchers got the parents and older adult siblings at a family gathering to start talking about funny things that happened when the kids were growing up. That included a made up story about when they went to one of the younger adult siblings' third grade school play, where something funny happened involving him.

Much later the researchers managed to arrange for that person to end up in a conversation that turned to elementary school plays, and that person on their own brought up their third grade play and the funny incident, and even added details that were not in the story told at the gathering.

When I said the story was made up, I didn't mean that what was made up was that something funny happened to him during the play. In fact his third grade class never had a play, nor did any of his other elementary school classes. Nor he did he attend any class plays from other classes.

Some do; others involve more subtle tricks like having subjects watch a video of a car crash, then using different wording a week later to ask them about details of the video (to spoil the surprise, the wording of the questions significantly alters recollection of what happened in the video).

So is the legal justice system, witness testimony, job interviews, etc.

It does not matter if they lied, if lies are indistringyishable from truth. The conclusion holds.

Strong bias on HN about replication. But the ability to implant false memories has been widely researched and replicated. This isn't a stretch. Memory is very fallible.

Exactly. Leonardo Dicaprio did it

How would you propose we differentiate between students "playing along" and students really having false memories? Couldn't I discard any psychological study by saying "well, the participants could have faked it", since it's by definition not falsifiable (any test could also be faked)?

You should indeed be extremely skeptical of studies whose only dependent variable is a voluntary participant response and where the participant has an incentive to tell the experimenter what they think they want to hear (for example, to make the experiment end faster).

Except in this case for the follow up interviews there was no incentive to lie.

They’re incentivized to tell the experimenters what they want to hear so they can get paid and go home faster.

Having participated in plenty of these (as it was required for class credit, and they also paid reasonably well for an in-between classes hour type thing to go do), the 'researchers' can also be completely obnoxious. One study I was involved in had me listen to some rant about how women do better on a math exam I was about to take, being left in a room for about 10 minutes alone, and then being given the exam - on pink paper. It was generic algebra 2 / SAT level test.

After the exam the researchers just endlessly hounded me from a hundred different angles trying to get me to express doubt or uncertainty in how I performed on it. If I just wanted my $20 and credit, it would have been far easier to just give them what they wanted. But I've been ever the contrarian. They also said they'd email me my results in 8 weeks. They did not. I've always wondered if I ended up getting culled from their 'study' as an 'outlier.'

Funny, but my one and only contact with PLATO when I was at the U of I was for a Psych 100 experiment like this.

That just sounds like bad research. In general if you know their angle that clearly then they’ve failed at how to do a research study of this type — obnoxious or not. It sounds like they don’t know how to do this type of research.

I'm not sure that was the problem. Journals don't tend to publish negative results, and social science journals seem to have 0 issues with publishing studies that are overtly designed to confirm a hypothesis, rather than challenge it. Add in a bit of publish or perish, and this behavior is ubiquitous. What would you say is an example of good research in social psychology?

As an example of bad science, you look to what's likely the single most well known experiment in social psychology - the Stanford Prisoner Experiment. It's not only failed to replicate, but was mostly entirely fabricated. [1] The famous clip of the guy screaming out 'I can’t stand another night! I just can’t take it anymore!' came from a guy who was intentionally faking a meltdown, because he needed to go study and they weren't allowing him access to his books, the guards were actively trained to be cruel, and more. Incidentally Zimbardo (the experimenter), far from being shunned, has received countless accolades for this experiment, some as recent as 2012.

[1] - https://gen.medium.com/the-lifespan-of-a-lie-d869212b1f62

In most psychological experiments, volunteers are told it will take an hour/an afternoon/whatever at the time they sign up to participate. The notion that all of them actually want to cut corners and just obtain the cash in return for the bare minimum of time and effort is an assumption about people in general, not a fact.

In the follow ups they are simply asked to recount and give their confidence of recounting. It’s only the original interview they are told to try to remember details even if they can’t.

The premise of the study is that the first interview is used to plant the memories. The follow up interviews are to see if they stick. They specifically aren’t trying to intervene in those interviews.

How would you propose, in this specific study, they verify what you want? Please be specific regarding what questions you want asked, when they should be asked, and how these questions can't be discarded by saying "well, they could be faking it".

I think this whole experimental paradigm is inherently unfixable.

So we just stop studying psychology completely?

You can't trust psychology because people sometimes lie.

You can't trust physics because you might be hallucinating.

What's left? Authoritarianism? Consensus? Tradition?

No, but the focus for studies like this should be on nonvoluntary responses like reaction times and EEG in my opinion.

How do you know that the EEG monitoring doesn't influence people? Couldn't they subconsciously fake it due to being actively monitored?

Or the people undertaking these studies (and more importantly, the people peer reviewing and publishing the work) push back on broad conclusions that aren't substantiated by the research.

Having seen the nonsense my partner has to put up with in order to get a post-graduate qualification to practice as a professional psychologist I'm not holding my breath. From where I'm sitting the replication crisis in this field looks like a crisis of incompetence and apathy.

> broad conclusions that aren't substantiated by the research.

But these aren't broad conclusions, they are specific conclusions, and they are substantiated by the research. You're just positing that the results could be entirely fake on a whim.

Or the science goes were the data is.. The servers of search engines or social networks. Psychology is what survives the queries into all of humanity.

Designing good studies is hard. That doesn’t mean we should just roll over and be satisfied with bad studies. The same applies to most studies about human diet and nutrition.

That is why I asked for some way to test for what GP complained about, and the only answer I got was "there is no way". Do you have a way to design a study so the complaint "well, the participants could be faking it" isn't valid? I'm legitimately asking, so far all I've gotten was "no way".

Not sure if I replied to you further up, or someone else, but in any scientific study you should be attempting to minimize the impact of the observation method used on the outcome of the data, and when it comes to answering questions truthfully, someone being aware that they are participating in a study does not do that at all. They should be using data from real-world situations in which people did not have an incentive to lie. Problem is, those are hard to find, and most studies are done in order for the researchers to get paid so they can pay rent and buy food.

There is far more incentive to conduct shoddy research in psychology (since as a corrolary to being hard to produce good evidence for, it's hard to produce good evidence against, which non-reproducability is often not treated as), than there is to only proceed with the studies you actually have sufficient known-good data to work with.

We have spent billions of dollars on single technology projects in order to answer questions about physics, like the LHC, because without those we often cannot actually get the data needed to answer certain questions.

Nothing equivalent is done in social psychology. There are no massive, multi-use infrastructures being built to engage with it.

While that is not the fault of social scientists, but of the devaluation of their field by the society around them, it still does mean they often do not have the necessary tools to do their jobs correctly.

> So we just stop studying psychology completely?

That's not the only option. Why is it the only one you can think of?

I mean, where are you going with "Our only options are to draw the wrong conclusions, or to stop studying it altogether"?

> That's not the only option. Why is it the only one you can think of?

It's not the only one I can think of, but no other options have been presented to me. I have been asking for solutions, but nobody has provided any that can't be dismissed on the same grounds.

> I mean, where are you going with "Our only options are to draw the wrong conclusions, or to stop studying it altogether"?

Where did I write anything close to that? I am not saying anything about drawing conclusions, I am literally asking: how would you design a test that measures the proposed problem? Why are you accusing me of advocating for "drawing the wrong conclusions"?

It's incredible how many people want to read my comments as advocating for something they are not. If you feel attacked because I'm asking how we could measure your idea, maybe I'm not the problem, but your idea is?

> It's not the only one I can think of, but no other options have been presented to me.

Well, then, with all due respect, if you already know of other options, why are you asking?

> I'm asking how we could measure your idea

Who cares? Even if you cannot "measure" (whatever that means) the alternatives, the fact still remains that people are drawing conclusions from incorrect and invalid data.

That's the point, really - the field of psychology is bereft of replicable studies.

Observing that the way a particular field performs research results in invalid conclusions doesn't put any obligation on the observer to provide alternatives.

It's enough to point out that a thing is wrong; there's no requirement to also provide the correct answer.

> Well, then, with all due respect, if you already know of other options, why are you asking?

If someone engages in a conversation with me and presents a thought, I would like them to present it fully. If there are obvious flaws or implications, I try to reflect them, both so I can be sure I correctly understood the other party, and to give them a chance to fill in those holes. I do not wish to just inject my own ideas everywhere, I want to understand people as they express themselves. Seems like a pretty normal way to talk to other humans to me.

> Who cares? Even if you cannot "measure" (whatever that means) the alternatives, the fact still remains that people are drawing conclusions from incorrect and invalid data.

And because you are declaring the data incorrect and invalid that means it is so? You will either have to share your research credentials which allow you to judge it as such, or you'll have to answer the obvious questions that come after such a statement (e.g. "how can you prove that?"). It's pretty normal in science that instead of people just blurting out thoughts which are taken as truths, we reflect on ideas and ask questions that help us get to a better understanding divided from our subjective point of view. If the best you can come up with is "well, it's obviously true, duh" then your thought isn't as good as you think.

> It's enough to point out that a thing is wrong

You are wrong. There, I said that you are wrong - does that make you wrong? If not, is there maybe some system by which we can determine whether you're right or wrong? Your response to this question is "no need, I am right".

> You will either have to share your research credentials which allow you to judge it as such

I was a research scientist[1] for 7 years of my 25 years of working experience.

What are your credentials?

> You are wrong. There, I said that you are wrong - does that make you wrong?

That's just your opinion. The lack of replicable results in psychology is not an opinion.

We are not debating whether or not the research can be replicated, are we?

I mean, are you seriously claiming that psychology is filled with replicable studies?

[1] EDIT: an accredited national research institution.

> I was a research scientist[1] for 7 years of my 25 years of working experience.

In what field? Is it close to psychology?

> That's just your opinion. The lack of replicable results in psychology is not an opinion.

I did not claim that psychology doesn't have a lack of replicable results.

> We are not debating whether or not the research can be replicated, are we?

No, we are not. We are debating whether we can dismiss this study without defining a way to falsify our claim.

> I mean, are you seriously claiming that psychology is filled with replicable studies?

Again, I am not claiming this, nor have I claimed it previously.

Not all of psychology, but this type of problem, yes. We just don't have the neurological knowledge required to get such information meaningfully yet. It would be like people in the 1700s trying to study nuclear forces - it's not an absurd endeavor, but they just didn't have the means yet.

That’s for the author of the paper to design into the experiment

And I'm asking you: what solution would make you happy? What would it have to look like?

Is it that hard to imagine that teens and the mentally impaired would do the same, focusing on resolving the present conflict (locked in room) over a future hypothetical problem (locked in jail)?

Yes, you could discard any study under that rationale among others. And the interesting thing is you'd likely be far more 'informed' for doing so. Social psychology has the lowest replication rate of any field. You're looking at top journals with replication rates in the twenties. [1]

What this means is that if you were to take any give study in social psychology, and simply assume it was 'wrong' (either saying the opposite of the truth, or claiming a statistically significant effect when there really is none), then you'd, on average, be dramatically more 'informed' than somebody taking the studies at face value. [2]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#In_psycholo...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoscience

I don't want to discount the replication crisis, but I'd like to ask you the same question again: how, specifically, do you design any psychological study that you can't discard with "well, they could be faking it"?

Measure changes in something the test subject isn't expecting and wouldn't realize they need to fake? E.g. if you had to sit in the waiting room for 5 extra minutes, your test score changes like this.

Measure differences below conscious control, like reaction speed to positive/negative/etc words after exposure to certain inputs.

This is too vague. Hiw would you test this hypothesys, that this stidu is teating, by measuring such unrelated signals?

Perhaps this hypothesis simply is harder to test scientifically. It seems lots of claims in psychology are not verifiable.

> Measure changes in something the test subject isn't expecting and wouldn't realize they need to fake? E.g. if you had to sit in the waiting room for 5 extra minutes, your test score changes like this.

I can discard this by saying "well, the subject might behave subconsciously differently when they know they are in any experiment". How would you refute that?

> Measure differences below conscious control, like reaction speed to positive/negative/etc words after exposure to certain inputs.

What if there are phenomena that don't correlate with the differences you know to measure?

It being extremely difficult or impossible to design a convincing study doesn't make the other ones convincing.

I am not saying that any study is or is not convincing. I am literally just asking: how could you define a test for this? I am not stating that any individual study is good or bad or anything in between. I want to know: if I design a study, how do I design it in a way that makes it a good study in regards to this question?

I don’t think it is reasonable to expect for a person on in a sort of informal online conversation like this to be able to define a bulletproof experiment for the topic.

Let’s apply a similar logic to something that is clearly possible to design an experiment around. How about detecting neutrinos? If we were commenting on an article about detecting neutrinos by dropping a piece of paper and seeing if it bounced around a bit on the way down, I think we’d all identify that as not a very good experiment. But, I could not design a very good experiment for detecting neutrinos. And, this doesn’t say much about whether or not neutrinos exist, I’m just not a physicist.

So, if posed with that question, I would not have a good response. Despite this, I would still believe the dropped piece of paper experiment was not very good.

> I don’t think it is reasonable to expect for a person on in a sort of informal online conversation like this to be able to define a bulletproof experiment for the topic.

I am allowed to ask, right? It doesn't seem crazy to me that when someone criticizes a study, someone else will ask "how could you solve the problem you describe?". I would like to know if someone has any idea on how to falsify it, because if someone were to find one, it might convince me of the criticism.

> Let’s apply a similar logic to something that is clearly possible to design an experiment around. How about detecting neutrinos? If we were commenting on an article about detecting neutrinos by dropping a piece of paper and seeing if it bounced around a bit on the way down, I think we’d all identify that as not a very good experiment. But, I could not design a very good experiment for detecting neutrinos. And, this doesn’t say much about whether or not neutrinos exist, I’m just not a physicist.

I don't think that is a good comparison. A better one would be if there is an experiment, and then someone comments on the results by saying "well, it could have been dark matter particles interacting in some way". It might as well be true, but it's not definitive if they don't explain how to measure and isolate that. Someone else asking for how they would design the experiment to take this into account seems like a completely reasonable ask to me.

I don't think you're asking an unfair question. Its now been answered, by many people, to the effect of "this study isn't convincing, but we don't see a simple way to design a convincing one".

I suppose it has. The answer is (hopefully understandably) disappointing, since it can be used to discard any scientific efforts involving subjects, but it's what I expected.

You'd need the participants not to know they are part of a study.

They'd need to be in a situation where they believe that the statement of their true beliefs is critical.

This isn't impossible (many studies do use primary sources which were not created for the purposes of a study, and where there was some incentive based on real-world circumstances for them to be truthful), but it is much more difficult and leaves gaps where insufficient primary sources materials addressing the questions of the study are available.

Psychologists are well aware that the current model for many psychology studies, which consists of either asking an extremely small sample of participants to sit in a computer lab at a university for 20 minutes answering questions, or sending out very loosely-targeted emails soliciting participation, are both very inefficient.

But they gotta get published, cause that's how you put food on the table.

It might not be possible with current knowledge, putting psychology outside the realm of the sciences.

Was this not the whole point of the study in TFA comparing false memories of crimes to false memories of non-crimes? The assumption that people would be less willing to admit to a serious crime than to having been injured?

> Intriguingly, the criminal false events seemed to be just as believable as the emotional ones. Students tended to provide the same number of details, and reported similar levels of confidence, vividness, and sensory detail for the two types of event.

Well, maybe you don't? Science gives you the tools to know when you're wrong. If you can't falsify your hypotheses then you're not generating new knowledge. So maybe stop trying and do something else.

Which is not to say that we should stop psychological research- not at all. But maybe we should not treat psychology in the same way we treat science. Specifically, we shouldn't be trying to apply the scientific method in psychological research. Applying the tools of science in a domain where no scientific questions can be answered is only going to produce noise and confusion.

I know that would really hurt psychologists' pride but, for example, philosophers are not considered scientists and yet their contributions to human knowledge are difficult to deny.

Similar points have been made much more forcefully in "Cargo Cult Science", but I don't want to be mean myself. I'm just trying to say that I think there's far better ways to do psychology than trying to do it like it's physics or chemistry.

> What this means is that if you were to take any give study in social psychology, and simply assume it was 'wrong' (either saying the opposite of the truth, or claiming a statistically significant effect when there really is none), then you'd, on average, be dramatically more 'informed' than somebody taking the studies at face value.

The parenthetical seems like a problem to me. In the sense that, maybe you are right and most psychology research tells us nothing. But that won’t tell us the opposite is true. There are lots of possible outcomes in a psychological experiment, “the opposite” is ill defined.

> How would you propose we differentiate between students "playing along" and students really having false memories?

Remove the incentive for the student to fabulate.

Have another, supposedly (to the students) 'independent' researcher ask them questions about it days or weeks later. A potential way of doing this would be to have a member of the Institutional Review Board (or supposed member of said board) following up with the students as a matter of 'quality control' and verification that the study followed IRB guidelines. Phrase the reason for the questioning as looking for non-punitive, but developmental, feedback for the researcher.

For ethical reasons this would probably require blinding the original researcher to the identities of the students, but this could be done by having people other than the PI actually ask the questions.

For a particular study on whether or not the student did something criminal, have the questioner truthfully assert to the student binding confidentiality as to their identity by dint of being a psychologist or someone like that who has the legal duty to not divulge.

Thank you for an actual proposal! It makes a lot of sense to me, but there is one reason it probably wouldn't be allowed: the study "implanted" false memories (in the sense that participants stated they believed false memories). I don't think the study would pass ethical review if you were only to follow up days or weeks later (after the supposed end of the study), since that would also be the earliest point you would be able to clear up the lie.

It could probably be tailored to a shorter time period.

A possible great way to do it is have the students originally questioned by grad students, and then the professor themself 'follow up' shortly afterward as a 'check' on their grad student's process. The problem with that is that some of the students may feel incentivized to make the grad student look good.

I'm sure many of us have experienced the effect where you're having an argument with someone where it doesn't really matter and the other person agrees with you to shut you up.

It is impossible to discuss Psychology on HN. I think STEM type personalities are incapable of fathoming that the mind can be studied. I tend to think that the STEM personality has a lower than average ability for self-reflection, and thus they still think the mind is a mysterious phenomena that is beyond science. They aren't able to observe their own minds, and thus think it is impossible for anybody else to either.

Uh, no, HN is perennially fascinated with the mind, and grabs up any verifiable bits of information it can. That's why we've been exposed to all the myriad ways the mind is genuinely hard to study. We've seen the rise and fall of lots of studies, some plausible, some not, and we're tired of being conned on something important to us.

That is a lot more even minded opinion on it that I've seen in the last few weeks. Typically Psychology is called a pseudoscience, garbage, a-kin to astrology, filled with out right liars, conmen. There is very little patience to let the scientific process work itself out. Somehow other fields are allowed to grow, but Psychology is judged very harshly. Some studies aren't able to be replicated, so the whole field is bad.

At least, that is what I've seen in last few weeks. Maybe it hasn't always been like this.

> we're tired of being conned on something important to us.

Sorry, but psychology as a field is in fact full of BS; probably not outright lies, but shoddy science. It's treated harshly compared to other fields because it cannot live up to the same standards they do, even considering times when those fields screw up badly. It's not a recent thing, either. The replication crisis is old, and I haven't seen any indication that the field has put any effort into deciding to "grow".

I haven't noticed a change in HN's attitude either, but maybe that's because I don't tend to bother with those threads anymore.

I misunderstood. I thought you were saying HN is interested in the mind. If HN is interested, what other field that is doing Psychology, but not called Psychology, is acceptable that they are following?

For this field, HN doesn't seem able to work through scientific issues. In other fields if a study is shoddy, it gets called out or modified. Hypothesis are re-formed, re-tested. But in HN, there is no second chance. The entire field is BS because of a few bad studies.

It seems like this field is ridiculed more because HN does NOT understand what they are talking about on the subject. Why do you think this subject is not important to others too, that are improving the field, and are making corrections. If people on HN finds this subject important, it's a pretty odd way to discuss it.

I can only assume this default reaction is very much a 'group-think' response. Kind of like how people stormed the capital to fight the 'woke-left', on HN it is a angry group fighting the 'shoddy Psychologist', both are similarly in the dark. Meaning, consumed by anger against a miss-understood other group. Seemingly just angry and very much not wanting to understand themselves.

>"That's why we've been exposed to all the myriad ways the mind is genuinely hard to study. "

Guess this is what I don't get. It seems like HN accepts that studying the mind is hard. But then seems equally to not understand that hard things take time and often have false starts and difficulty dialing in measurements.

The ancient Greeks thought atoms were made of earth, wind, fire, water. We don't call them BS because it doesn't replicate. Psychology is relatively new, yet we want instant results, instant gratification.

We've had centuries to figure out how to measure temperature. But Psychology takes a few decades and still struggles to measure the mind, and that means it is BS?

No, we actually do call BS on the Greeks. They didn't even have any experiments to replicate. It's sheer luck that they got the "atom" thing right, and no other aspects of matter.

When psychology is prepared to take its inherent difficulty seriously, we'll listen. But as far as we can tell, they're still trying to take shortcuts. (And even if you complain that's because they're underfunded or something, it doesn't matter. The results are just as compromised.)

Sorry. Don't get it. I did quick search and see dozen articles from Psychologist, discussing the replication problem and how to deal with it, how to create better experiments. And, another dozen discussing which ones DO REPLICATE, and which don't, and what is the difference.

50% of experiments do replicate, so maybe it is just taking a glass-half-full attitude.

The field is very much actively dealing on this and improving. So not sure what proof's HN would need.

That is why I'm saying, right now the attitude seems very much be "we really diss-like these fields (because we're so biased against anything that isn't STEM), so they really can't do anything right no matter the evidence".

Well, we'll see in 10 years I guess if it actually works, but we have no reason to trust that they'll actually attack the underlying problems, which are related to things like bad statistical modelling, publication bias, funding, etc. All easier to write articles about than do. They're going to have to re-earn our trust.

> Evidence from some wrongful-conviction cases suggests that suspects can be questioned in ways that lead them to falsely believe in and confess to committing crimes they didn’t actually commit.

It's been known for like dozens of years at least. What happened in soviet Russia and in China during the cultural revolution was all about making people convinced that they had committed crimes and that they deserved their punishment, and it worked very well.

Unfortunately you do not have to look to the past or the other side of the globe to find an epidemic of false confessions.

Indeed. Probably the dirtiest open secret of the US criminal justice system is that it is structurally incapable of giving a truly fair trial to the vast majority of the accused. The system would grind to a halt without the vast majority of cases ending in plea bargains, and we have pretty good reasons to suspect that common police interrogation tactics (often functionally indistinguishable from psychological abuse) tend to produce false confessions [1] [2].

[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/02/22/1158356619/plea-bargains-crim...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/29/opinion/false-confessions...

There actually have been cases where public defenders have used this to organize and demand better treatment for themselves and the defendants. Where public defenders all convince their defendants not to plea, simultaneously, thereby forcing the court into a situation where they cannot avoid violating the constitutional right to a reasonably speedy trial due to all of the cases. I wished more civil resistance like this happened, but I know how career-threatening a stunt like this could be.

I think a bigger issue in this case might be there public defenders are oversubscribed and sometimes not acting with all the vigor one might wish.

I think there is a worse problem still... I could tolerate exhausted public defenders putting up a weak fight. After all, even a weak effort is still effort.

But who do these public defenders identify with? They went to law school too, they passed the bar too. Their careers 15 years from now will look much like the prosecutors' careers. Hell, they might be sitting behind a bench, they're on the right career track.

If they identify with the other lawyers and the judges, then they might not be putting any effort into it at all. They might instead be in the business of conducting their "clients" through the plea bargain pipeline, and act as if their duties primarily revolve around making certain that pipeline doesn't get clogged up.

This wouldn't be all public defenders, mind you. But even a minor fraction of public defenders acting in this way would be horrific.

Yeah, I was being somewhat polite with the way I stated it... A PD who meets you at the last minute and just shepherds you through plea bargaining wouldn't be a surprise, and horror stories of them dozing off in court and the like abound.

What does this peppering of whataboutism add to the conversation?

I think trying to do apply this finding to an ongoing injustice is more urgent than cataloguing the failings of a defunct state.

You are welcome to add those points to the discussion but right now all we have a statement of, ‘but… but… they do it too!’.

I appreciate the downvote though.

I can’t downvote your replies (I’m pretty sure in general you can’t downvote any replies to yourself on HN) so you’ll have to take that complaint up with someone else. Anyway, what, I’m “more than welcome” to add these points but in some other, unspecified way than I did that you would have preferred? I’m not really sure what your issue is. I think it’s encouraging complacency to say these things happened in the Orient decades ago and not they’re happening right now, every day, in our own backyards.

Ooof. Well that is rather uncalled for.

https://aboutjapan.japansociety.org/content.cfm/whats_the_ma...

Moving on…

The GP quoted the article and found interesting anecdotes of said quote in history and brought them into the discussion with background information backing up the anecdotes. That’s interesting and additive to the discussion! Your comment did none of that except to slander another side of the world. This is not to say that there are not examples that would support your point, you just apparently don’t feel the need to add anything more!

Working with you on being a better citizen of society (please update your terminology…) is also not interesting or additive to this thread. So I am going to leave it at that. Have a nice day.

I'm familiar with the connotations of the term "Orient," but that was kind of the point of using it in this instance -- I think having Maoist struggle sessions be the first thing that comes to mind is the same kind of thinking about how something is exotic and foreign when it isn't. Maybe you would have gotten my point better if I put the term in scare quotes. I think the attacks on me as "not a decent member of society" are just kind of personal attacks that aren't very germane to the discussion.

I think the whole charge of "whataboutism" is pretty bankrupt for reasons I think this article pretty accurately sums up: https://theoutline.com/post/8610/united-states-russia-whatab...

> Try to imagine the following world: the Chinese Communist Party accuses the U.S. of crimes against humanity in the Middle East, and Washington does not turn around and say something like, “What are you talking about! You have one million people in re-education camps in the Xinjiang Province!” In this imaginary world, I guess, US officials would respect the fact that China is only talking about the Middle East right now, and out of politeness refuse to talk about anything else. To do so would be crude whataboutism.

> Can you imagine that happening? Of course not. English-language commentators would contest the right of Xi Jinping to set the terms of the debate, and they’d use the opportunity to draw attention to human rights violations in China, which would be a good thing. Because, I think, it’s good when we expose and condemn any crimes against humanity, no matter the motivations for the revelation.

> Let’s try an arena much smaller than the geopolitical. What if a man comes home, and says to his wife:

> “Susan, you didn’t take out the trash!” he says.

> “Brad, you have never taken out the trash once in your life,” she replies.

> Would it be fair for him to turn, smugly clutching a copy of The Economist, and say, “Susan, this is not about me. I can’t believe you are doing whataboutism”?

The problem with whataboutism is when it's used by an abusive party to try to get the other abusive party to jointly agree that each party's abuse is okay.

Other than that, yes, it's good to expose abuses (as long as over-exposure isn't being used to swamp out public awareness or caring of other abuses).

Downvoting has a high positive karma requirement IIRC.

I'm allowed to downvote comments that aren't replies to me all I want.

It's 500. You'll get there eventually. If you click on emodendroket's name you'll see that they have over 20 thousand.

Somehow your call for them to add more points to the discussion adds even less to the discussion. Maybe that's the cause of your down votes.

Fair enough.

Mentioning the USSR in a thread about Western researchers researching phenomenon that happens in the West while in the West: not whataboutism.

Pointing out the thing Western researchers were researching about in the West on Western subjects might happen in the West: extreme, egrecious, purely churlish whataboutism!

Well sure, when you ignore the quality of the comments, you can clearly frame it that way. No matter, there is not a quality comment in this thread.

Or you know, it being the standard work process for police these days apparently, so they can pat themselves on the back and go home early: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obCNQ0xksZ4

This study was immediately critiqued for distorted results due to the way the researchers interpreted the data.

"We used three different approaches to recode their data. Using Shaw and Porter's approach, we replicated their 70%. Using alternative approaches that distinguish between false beliefs and memories, we found 26-30% of subjects met the criteria for false memories. Moreover, we showed that laypeople’s understanding of remembering better aligns with the alternative coding approaches than with Shaw and Porter’s."

http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/87062/

Ok, so -- half full or half empty? Or are you saying it's all BS?

Not quite as bad as expected. This means that a bit more than half of those with false beliefs probably wouldn't testify to the absolute truth of their belief in court.

This was published 8 years ago. Makes me wonder if it's replicated yet or if anyone has tried.

I certainly am no fan of the reliability of human memory. It surprises me that more people aren't skeptical just from their own experiences. So many times I've told stories of things I did or remember from when I was young, especially to my wife, only to eventually visit my parents and find out I'm wrong and that never happened.

And, of course, among my earlier memories are from kindergarten. I remember seeing the Challenger explosion happen in class and I remember missing half the year because of pneumonia. They can't possibly both be true because they'd have happened at the same time, but I remember both nonetheless. Is my memory of watching the OJ verdict live in high school history class also false? I have no idea, but I wouldn't be the least bit surprised. I have no idea how much of my remembered life actually happened without independent corroboration.

It leads to such conflicted feelings when the subject comes up of people remembering childhood abuse they'd "suppressed." No doubt many more children are abused than remember and many, if not most, abusers never come to justice. But also no doubt many of these memories, like the entirety of the Satanic Panic, never happened, and many people are in prison or registered for life unable to get a regular job, who never did anything.

It's worth remembering this as we see the development in real time of LLMs and other somewhat intelligent tools that are able to just make shit up and seem totally confident about it. They're not the only ones that hallucinate. All prediction and recall systems that are inherently probabilistic but need to tell only one story are likely to be susceptible to this kind of thing, including any and every AI we will ever develop, including ourselves. Claims need to have evidence and be independently verifiable or you shouldn't trust them. Even your own claims.

I remember reading a story on here about the two daughters of the founder of the false memory institute who served as expert widnes for the defence of multiple sexual abuse cases accusing their father of incest himself and having invented this false memory thing as a psychological cope.

Maybe it was this one https://www.thecut.com/article/false-memory-syndrome-controv...

Simone wielding AI nefariously will eventually use this tidbit about human nature to terrible effect.

What a terrifying thought that is.

We’ve got to stop Simone!

AI is not necessary to make your population believe the Big Lie - in fact, by applying a consistent false narrative to an entire group, you get reinforcement effects by more impressionable members of the group towards those with a greater resistance.

This has been used, repeatedly, through history.

Now, where AI could be applied would be in having a tailored, sculpted false narrative for each and every subject, which could be used for mass sentiment manipulation - profile each target, determine the ideal narrative to achieve the desired emotional and behavioural outcome, implant, rinse and repeat.

Could be used for nefarious purposes, could be used for benign purposes - although it’s hard to see anything that involves the mass brainwashing of a population as benign. Perhaps it would be useful for deprogramming - undoing the effects of the currently prevalent methods where desirable, such as indoctrinated cult members, dictator worshippers, and religious zealots - but right there in my postulating you see scope creep, and that’s why it’s almost inevitable this will end up being applied for marketing and programming purposes.

Remember when you first fell in love with Morbo brand human kibble? We do.

You touched on a disturbing point. People like to imagine that some govt will wield to indoctrinate the populace, but it is more likely this kind of tool would be used for marketing or advertisement. look at how many people gladly work for FANG/whatever companies and develop tools just to supercharge advertisement but see no moral issues with it. as long as they're making money, and a lot of money, who cares right?

I mean advertisements already are basically brainwashing right? quirky jingles or catch phrases associated with some food or product, that stick in your head.

If you google Paris and you get an ad for a hotel, that isn't brainwashing. It's fun to be radical but let's stay grounded here.

Come on, we all know that marketing goes further than that. Very simple example to disprove your thought-ending comment:

I am a hypothetical gun shop owner and want to increase sales, so I put up ads that talk about the need to defend against high crime rates onto any search that might be related to the local area, anything about security, anything for new renters and owners. Without telling people that the area has a high crime rate, people will start to believe that it does, and that they need to protect themselves.

Ah, but if you Google Paris in the first place, that is an outcome of marketing - which is for all intents and purposes brainwashing. Bernays, who invented modern advertising, said as much himself in “Propaganda”.

So: Why google Paris? Why even Paris as an example? Hell - why Paris, period?

Examine your answer carefully, and you’ll see the non-sequiturs in our reality that we usually happily ignore.

Instead of answering your question, I will answer a related question. "Did you pick Paris as an example because of FAANG advertisements?", as FAANG ads was the original topic here. And the answer to that is no.

> You touched on a disturbing point. People like to imagine that some govt will wield to indoctrinate the populace, but it is more likely this kind of tool would be used for marketing or advertisement.

Many people imagine companies indoctrinating the population but we are brushed off with "the first amendment only applies to the government" and nonsense about how companies and platforms don't have to uphold free speech because they're not the government, they don't owe you anything, and if you don't like it find another company to do business with.

It's definitely disturbing how people will give corporations leeway to inflict harm upon society because they're not the government.

My point with this comment is that companies already use censorship to create a false narrative of the public opinion so it shouldn't surprise us that they'll use AI on top of that to achieve the same goals. They won't even have to censor people if they can create an infinite on-demand stream of content that supports the narrative they want to push.

Can’t tell if typo, or if speaking about relevant film (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_(2002_film))

Starring one of my favorite actors, AI Pacino

I could go for a Dunkaccino.

"The AI" itself will. Along with blackmail. Probably the worst thing (if this comes to pass) Humans ever did was make a generation think they'll make shiny skeleton robots wielding guns with red eyes instead of sit in the shadows of a datacenter combining n-grams into weapons

I wonder if this is why people can become angry and aggressive when you accuse them of something. That would provide a natural defense against this kind of suggestibility.

It obviously wouldn't work with the modern police, because they would overpower you, but a few thousand years ago? I think it could've worked.

I can hear the police response now. “Why are you so angry about me accusing you of committing such a heinous crime that may even bear the death penalty if you didn’t do it?”

"Because it's insulting that you think so lowly of me!"

Wrong! "I'm invoking my right to remain silent, and I want my lawyer"

Then you proceed to say nothing, no matter how much they're trying to provoke you. You also get a phone call

https://youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE

"Stop resisting" as they do whatever they want to you.

>It obviously wouldn't work with the modern police, because they would overpower you

Never go into a police interrogation without a lawyer regardless of innocence or guilt. That's our only counter today.

Only if you can get a lawyer.

In many parts of the world, you can't.

Thinking about anger as a defense makes a lot of sense to me. The cost to the individual whose opinion might be changed is pretty big: you will have to re-evaluate any thoughts that branches off the thought that is being challenged, so it might have a cascading effect. There needs to either be some natural stopping points (i.e. the thought graph is acyclic), or some other mechanism must keep us from going in circles.

Not convincing in the general sense at least; I get high on learning new things that change my perspective entirely -- and that doesn't seem to be uncommon

But is that literally always the case? Most of the time I also like learning new things, even things that change my perspective entirely. But that is when I am in the mood to actually engage with knowledge. There are other times when I'm much more annoyed by new knowledge going against what I already know. Let's say I'm doing my taxes, and my tax program has a popup "here are 804 changes to the tax code from last year", I will not be happy about having to learn that.

Maybe this difference is caused by the perceived usefulness of new information. If there is potential for my new perspective to greatly help me, it might be worth exploring more than if I can't see any way for it to be productive.

I think this is the mind defending its worldview, in the same way as people react when you question or present evidence that contradicts. And yes, it is a natural defense against changing your mind and can be rationalized as a survival strategy (my worldview has kept me alive and healthy so far, and adjusting it is increasing risk).

That's why confession obtained in unrestricted police interrogation can't be the only part of justice process. There first has to be evidence to detain and interrogate someone in the first place. The suspect must be informed of the right to remain silent and consequences of saying anything, and given an option to consult with a lawyer. Judges and juries should demand that collaborating evidence is presented to show that confession confirmed aspects of the crime that were not publicly known.

If someone is well aware that they will end up in prison if they "remember" something from teenager years and that they don't have to say anything / are free to go, they will be much less likely to play along vs a student who knows they are part of a study with no real life consequences.

> There first has to be evidence to detain and interrogate someone in the first place.

No there isn’t. The cops can just claim you were in the are- even if you weren’t. And no, “asleep in my bed because the crime happened at 3 am” happens to not be an alibi.

> Judges and juries should demand that corroborating evidence is presented to show that confession confirmed aspects of the crime that were not publicly known.

It’s actually possible to coerce someone into confessing with details not even they know of, with the police nudging them towards details of the case not publicly known. “No, you’re lying about killing him with handgun, it’s not a nicer way to kill someone’s than how you actually did it, you wanted to get up close and personal didn’t you”.

> If someone is well aware that they will end up in prison if they "remember" something from teenager years and that they don't have to say anything / are free to go, they will be much less likely to play along vs a student who knows they are part of a study with no real life consequences.

Okay, but a student also isn’t being held and gaslit well into the night with no sleep, food, or water, constantly told “if you just cooperate we can help you” (a complete lie) by the cops.

If there was the political will for it, nothing about our legal system makes it impossible to prohibit admitting confessions as evidence in court. We could just say "those are never evidence, the prosecution isn't allowed to introduce them or even hint that they have occurred".

Police could still use them as a lead, to track down real evidence. If the culprit claims to have disposed of the murder weapon and they discover the weapon where he said it was, that's real evidence.

But more generally, eyewitness testimony itself (of which confessions are just a special variant of) should be inadmissible. Professionals giving professional testimony from notes and reports they have compiled should be the whole of it.

So many devs like me have wrote, approved and even committed code that we eventually convinced ourselves was correct.

Without a git log and belief my keys are secured, I've read code I've written that I would never have believed I could have written, both good and bad.

Memory is a fabrication. Scars are real. Wounds have stories.

I'm reminded of a famous case in Chicago in which a juvenile confessed to murdering his mother, and even offered many details that could only have been known to the person who committed the crime. There were calls for trying the kid as an adult, reviving the death penalty, etc.

Then it was discovered that the police had gotten their files mixed up, and the kid had actually confessed to the wrong crime.

Can you re-word this? It's hard to understand what you mean.

Are you saying his mother was murdered, he confessed, but they mixed up the "unknowable details" from another crime, prompted the boy into knowing those, and then he confessed the unknowable details from another murder?

It seems weird to say "he confessed to the wrong crime" given the circumstances, so I can't figure it out any other way.

To me it sounds like he was in custody for an unrelated case and was questioned on the murdered mother case and admitted to all those details.

Who knows though until the original poster decides to come back.

"Chicago" and "false confession" turns up way more hits than it should. I couldn't find a story that matched those particular details. I've found others, like one where a kid was put in prison for confessing to fatally stabbing a woman. A woman, who was choked and beaten to death, not stabbed. Not even once.

And the same cold reading techniques that allow psychics to know intimate details of your life can be done in reverse to get people to admit to details they shouldn't know. If the victim wore a red shirt. You don't ask what color shirt they were wearing, you ask if they were wearing a red shirt. If they say "I don't know", you tell them that's not good enough. They need to answer "yes" or "no". You got a 50/50 chance for them to admit it was red. And if it was pink, when they say, "I don't know", you can then say, "Would you say it was more of a pink than a red?".

Regardless, you badger, intimidate, and coerce into getting them to come to the same conclusion you did before you walked into the room. That they did it.

Yes, exactly as you describe.

This is one of many reasons why you should never talk to police. There's nothing you can say that will better your position, and almost anything you do say will hurt your position. Famous video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE&pp=ygUUZG9uJ3Qgd...

Just hope that you're not in a jurisdiction in which silence can be used against you (such as the UK)

Anyone interested should just Google 'Elizabeth Loftus'. She convinced people of a bunch of things that never happened, some of them very quickly. Standard example is getting people to tell stories about meeting Bugs Bunny in Disneyland, but there was also some crime stuff, I think past trauma as well.

Law enforcement has their quotas and they'll use any garbage they can to fill it, but it's kind of hilarious that people just trust their memories for important stuff they can control.

Loftus has also been involved with the cases of [Robert Durst, Ghislaine Maxwell, Harvey Weinstein, Jerry Sandusky,] Ted Bundy, O.J. Simpson, Rodney King, Oliver North, Martha Stewart, Lewis Libby, Michael Jackson, the Menéndez brothers and the Oklahoma City bombers.

Completely normal. Absolutely no reason to question her work.

She did some CIA consulting, too.

Argh! The fact that false memories can be induced does not mean that all memories are false.

Commentary: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/04/05/how-elizabeth-...

Rebuttal: https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2021/04/25/the-new-yorkers-hi...

It does however mean that if you're trying to manipulate someone to reveal or recall something, you need to be careful that you're not just making them fabricate it.

Agreed; there should be no manipulation, but evidently that's too high a bar for most people most of the time.

Wow, that New Yorker article really is something. She hires private investigators to obtain sealed court records about an allegation of child abuse and de-anonymized the child. Then when the university reprimands her for this and tells her to turn over the documents, she calls that an "Orwellian nightmare". Orwellian? Who's the one doing the spying, procuring documents they have no right to possess? Loftus herself was the Orwellian nightmare but she saw herself as the victim in this. Even if Loftus's hypothesis about the case is correct, she clearly caused a great deal of emotional anguish for this person but was more concerned with the university telling her to leave it alone. The whole of this article paints her as a narcissist if not a psychopath.

The whyevolutionistrue rebuttal is insubstantial, it doesn't address this at all.

> The fact that false memories can be induced does not mean that all memories are false.

How is this even slightly relevant?

If some memories are false, and other memories are true, and none of us can tell which is which, then according to our principles of justice we must act as if all memories are potentially false.

"Memory as evidence" crumbles at that point.

SORCERY, n. The ancient prototype and forerunner of political influence. It was, however, deemed less respectable and sometimes was punished by torture and death. Augustine Nicholas relates that a poor peasant who had been accused of sorcery was put to the torture to compel a confession. After enduring a few gentle agonies the suffering simpleton admitted his guilt, but naively asked his tormentors if it were not possible to be a sorcerer without knowing it. --Ambrose Bierce

> ~70+ %

I wonder if this is an inherent brain bias thing, leaving some more susceptible than others.

I wonder if analogs can be found -- for example, in the way some people blame themselves for the "crime" of letting a marriage or relationship fail. Or allow themselves to be consumed by guilt when a loved one succumbs to an illness, or is lost in a horrible accident (that they feel they could have prevented, or reacted more quickly to somehow).

This article reminds me of an episode of Derren Brown's TV show, called "The Heist"[0], where he supposedly manipulates a group of ordinary people to commit an armed robbery. Apparently, in a more recent episode called "The Guilt Trip"[1], he convinces people they have committed murder, which seems even more similar to what's described in this article. It would be interesting to read a skeptic's analysis of the phenomenon, since you're left wondering how much is caused by people acting to please the observer (the cameras in Brown's case, the experimenter in the article's case) and how much is actual planted false memories.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDtMMsFoHuY

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AzTLw0Xwok

Do you remember the movie Under Suspicion (2000)[1], starring Gene Hackman? Can’t say too much without spoilers, but it’s related.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_Suspicion_(2000_film)

The paper itself: https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614562862

I don't need convincing. When something bad happens, I always feel responsible.

Couldn't find what I was looking for in a store? Better walk out feeling like I took money out of the cash register.

Especially innocent people under first time interrogation. Police, prosecutors and judges know this full well. Anything for conviction rates.

I do not believe for a second you can convince any innocent person rhey have commites any serious crime unless they suffer from heavy amnesia.

Is there a typo in here? Your first comment contradicts your second.

I believe if a concentrated effort was made on social media to censor all talk of "round earth theories" (the exception being posts that are sufficiently dogpiled and ridiculed, to be made example of), creating a fake display of global unified flat earth thinking; given only a few months, 99% would turn flat-earthers. I also believe the only reason this has not happened yet is because there isn't any real profit in doing it. Social media is an incredibly powerful tool for manipulating people by displaying a fake image of them being alone in their way of thinking and in need of readjustment or risk ostracization. Ironically I couldn't explain on a better example, as mentioning cases closer to reality would just get this post censored. And I'm not talking about vaccines, gender or race theory. And if you can't immediately think of 20 things you're just not allowed to say on any platform, you're just not thinking anymore.

I think most scientific theories, if given false data and evidence, would no longer be believed. That’s just because most people have very little direct evidence of the root of most phenomena. This seems very different than convincing me that I committed a crime that I didn’t.

Reminds me Derren Brown’s ‘The Push’. Trailer here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doFpACkiZ2Q

> The researchers identified a total of 60 students who had not been involved in any of the crimes designated as false memory targets in the study and who otherwise met the study criteria. These students were brought to the lab for three 40-minute interviews that took place about a week apart.

Psychology is the study of 18-25 year old undergrads.

There are FOUR lights!

RIP Uncle Ted

(2015)

- 2x30 participants - Not chosen at random - No double blinding - Plenty of leeway for influence by conductors of experiment

I'm not convinced these results can be generalized into more than: some researchers could trick 60 handpicked students into seemingly believing a false memory for a short period of time. Let's wait if this is reproducible.

I don’t understand your argument. “People Can Be Convinced They Committed a Crime That Never Happened” The test subject were people, they got convinced.

They are not claiming that everyone under every circumstance can be convinced they commited any crime.

Even if it can only happen sometimes to some people under some circumstances that would be of great importance to the process of justice.

You are right. I indeed thought only probabilities would matter here, when it is possibilities.

> You are right.

Thank you.

> thought only probabilities would matter here, when it is possibilities

Oh! That puts it very succintly. That is a very good way to express what i was thinking. I will use your phrasing in the future in similar cases where this distinction matters.

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