The influence of confabulations about the reasons for the choice on the formation of false memories
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21638/spbu16.2023.409Abstract
The article examines the causes of the choice blindness aftereffect on the formation of false memories. Several studies have shown that when individuals provide reasons for a choice they did not actually make, their memories shift towards the invented justifications (confabulations). The aim of this study is to contrast the explanation of the mnemonic aftereffect of choice blindness in terms of cognitive dissonance theory with explanations in terms of recency and verbalization effects. In the experiment, we compared two situations: one where participants justified evaluations contradicting their initial opinions, and another where they justified evaluations but attributed them to their partners’ opinions. It was hypothesized that if self-justification induces cognitive dissonance, participants who confabulated reasons for choices believed to be their own would exhibit more false memories regarding the original choice compared to those who believed they justified their partner’s opinion. The first stage involved participants evaluating the IQ of women based on their photos. In the second stage they had to explain the reasons for the evaluations (either considering it their own choice or partner’s). Half of the evaluations submitted for explanations contradicted the previously issued ones (low evaluations changed to high ones and vice versa). In the third stage, the participants had to remember the original evaluation. A change in the pole of perceived IQ judgments was measured. The results confirmed the presence of the choice blindness effect. The effect of false memories was found only in the group that considered the presented evaluations to be their own opinions.
Keywords:
choice blindness, confabulations, misinformation, false memories, cognitive dissonance, recency effect, verbalization
Downloads
Download data is not yet available.
References
Литература
Гершкович В. А. Ложные воспоминания как результат сглаживания противоречия // Когнитивные исследования: сборник научных трудов. М.: ИП РАН, 2006. С. 163–176.
Гершкович В. А. Влияние дезинформации на воспоминание о сделанном выборе // Вестник Российского гуманитарного научного фонда. 2015. № 2 (79). С. 208–217.
Гершкович В. А., Гапоненко А. В. Говорим о том, что не знаем: проявление слепоты к выбору при заполнении 16-факторного опросника Р. Кеттелла // Вестник Ярославского государственного университета им. П. Г. Демидова. Сер. Гуманитарные науки. 2015. № 1 (31). С. 76–84.
Морошкина Н. В. Вербальное затенение // Большая российская энциклопедия: научно-образовательный портал. URL: https://bigenc.ru/c/verbal-noe-zatenenie-db6bf9/?v=6173460 (дата обращения: 08.02.2023).
Морошкина Н. В., Иванчей И. И., Тихонов Р. В., Карпов А. Д., Овчинникова И. В. Разработка и апробация «Российской базы нейтральных и улыбающихся женских лиц (“RuNeS Faces”)» // Экспериментальная психология. 2018. Т. 11, № 2. С. 34–49. https://doi.org/10.17759/exppsy.2018110203
Разорилова П. В. Влияние дезинформации на воспоминание о принятом решении: дис. маг. СПб., 2017.
Фестингер Л. Теория когнитивного диссонанса. СПб.: Ювента, 1999.
Bortolotti L. Stranger than fiction: Costs and benefits of everyday confabulation // Review of Philosophy and Psychology. 2018. Vol. 9 (2). P. 227–249. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-017-0367-y
Brown C., Lloyd-Jones T. J. Verbal facilitation of face recognition // Memory & Cognition. 2005. Vol. 33. P. 1442–1456. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03193377
Chater N., Johansson P., Hall L. The nonexistence of risk attitude // Frontiers in psychology. 2011. Vol. 2. Article 303 https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00303
Chrobak Q. M., Zaragoza M. S. Inventing stories: Forcing witnesses to fabricate entire fictitious events leads to freely reported false memories // Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. 2008. Vol. 15 (6). P. 1190–1195. https://doi.org/10.3758/PBR.15.6.1190
Cochran K. J., Greenspan R. L., Bogart D. F., Loftus E. F. Memory blindness: Altered memory reports lead to distortion in eyewitness memory // Memory and Cognition. 2016. Vol. 44. P. 717–726. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-016-0594-y
Ecker U. K. H., Lewandowsky S., Cheung C. S. C., Maybery M. T. He did it! She did it! No, she did not! Multiple causal explanations and the continued influence of misinformation // Journal of Memory and Language. 2015. Vol. 85. P. 101–115. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2015.09.002
Gershkovich V. A., Tikhonov R. V., Vasilieva A. S., Lvova O. V. How others change our memories: The effect of exposure to anonymous opinions // The Russian Journal of Cognitive Science. 2022. Vol. 9 (1–2). P. 44–52. https://doi.org/10.47010/22.1-2.3
Hall L., Johansson P., Strandberg T. Lifting the veil of morality: Choice blindness and attitude reversals on a self-transforming survey // PLoS ONE. 2012. Vol. 7 (9). Art. e45457. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0045457
Hall L., Strandberg T., Pärnamets P., Lind A., Tärning B., Johansson P. How the polls can be both spot on and dead wrong: Using choice blindness to shift political attitudes and voter intentions // PLoS ONE. 2013. Vol. 8 (4). Art. e60554. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0060554
Johansson P., Hall L., Sikström S., Olsson A. Failure to detect mismatches between intention and outcome in a simple decision task // Science. 2005. Vol. 310 (5745). P. 116–119. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1111709
Johansson P., Hall L., Sikström S., Tärning B., Lind A. How something can be said about telling more than we can know: On choice blindness and introspection // Consciousness and cognition. 2006. Vol. 15 (4). P. 673–699. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2006.09.004
Johansson P., Hall L., Sikström S. From change blindness to choice blindness // Psychologia. 2008. Vol. 51 (2). P. 142–155. https://doi.org/10.2117/PSYSOC.2008.142
Johansson P., Hall L., Tärning B., Sikström S., Chater N. Choice blindness and preference change: You will like this paper better if you (believe you) chose to read it! // Journal of Behavioral Decision Making. 2013. Vol. 27. P. 281–289. https://doi.org/10.1002/bdm.1807
Lee A. J., Hibbs C., Wright M. J., Martin N. G., Keller M. C., Zietsch B. P. Assessing the accuracy of perceptions of intelligence based on heritable facial features // Intelligence. 2017. Vol. 64. P. 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2017.06.002
Loftus E. F., Hoffman H. G. Misinformation and memory: The creation of new memories // Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. 1989. Vol. 118 (1). P. 100–104. https://doi.org/10.1037/0096-3445.118.1.100
Meissner C. A., Brigham J. C., Kelley C. M. The influence of retrieval processes in verbal overshadowing // Memory & Cognition. 2001. Vol. 29. P. 176–186. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03195751
Nisbett R. E., Wilson T. D. Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes // Psychological Review. 1977. Vol. 84 (3). P. 231–259. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.84.3.231
Otgaar H., Baker A. When lying changes memory for the truth // Memory. 2018. Vol. 26 (1). P. 2–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/09658211.2017.1340286
Pärnamets P., Hall L., Johansson P. Memory distortions resulting from a choice blindness task // D. C. Noelle, R. Dale, A. S. Warlaumont, J. Yoshimi, T. Matlock, C. D. Jennings, P. P. Maglio (eds). Proceedings of the 37th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Austin: Cognitive Science Society, 2015. P. 1823–1828.
Peirce J. W., Gray J. R., Simpson S., MacAskill M. R., Höchenberger R., Sogo H., Kastman E., Lindeløv J. PsychoPy: Experiments in behavior made easy // Behavior Research Methods. 2019. Vol. 51 (1). P. 195–203. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-018-01193-y
Polage D. The effect of telling lies on belief in the truth // Europe’s Journal of Psychology. 2017. Vol. 13 (4). P. 633–644. https://doi.org/10.5964/ejop.v13i4.1422
Rodriguez D. N., Strange D. False memories for dissonance inducing events // Memory. 2015. Vol. 23 (2). P. 203–212. https://doi.org/10.1080/09658211.2014.881501
Sagana A., Sauerland M., Merckelbach H. Witnesses’ blindness for their own facial recognition decisions: A field study // Behavioral Sciences & the Law. 2013. Vol. 31 (5). P. 624–636. https://doi.org/10.1002/bsl.2082
Sagana A., Sauerland M., Merckelbach H. Memory impairment is not sufficient for choice blindness to occur // Frontiers in Psychology. 2014a. Vol. 20 (5). P. 449. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00449
Sagana A., Sauerland M., Merckelbach H. ‘This is the person you selected’: Eyewitnesses’ blindness for their own facial recognition decisions // Applied Cognitive Psychology. 2014b. Vol. 28 (5). P. 753–764. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.3062
Schooler J. W., Gerhard D., Loftus E. F. Qualities of the unreal // Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. 1986. Vol. 12 (2). P. 171–181. https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.12.2.171
Schooler J. W., Engstler-Schooler T. Y. Verbal overshadowing of visual memories: some things are better left unsaid // Cognitive psychology. 1990. Vol. 22 (1). P. 36–71. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0285(90)90003-m
Stille L., Norin E., Sikström S. Selfdelivered misinformation — Merging the choice blindness and misinformation effect paradigms // PLoS ONE. 2017. Vol. 12 (3). P. e0173606. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0173606
Strandberg T., Sivén D., Hall L., Johansson P., Pärnamets P. False beliefs and confabulation can lead to lasting changes in political attitudes // Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. 2018. Vol. 147 (9). P. 1382 – 1399. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000489
White P. A. Causal report accuracy: retrospect and prospect // Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. 1987. Vol. 23 (4). P. 311–315. https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-1031(87)90043-6
Wilson T. D., Dunn D. S., Kraft D., Lisle D. J. Introspection, attitude change, and attitude-behavior consistency: The disruptive effects of explaining why we feel the way we do // L. Berkowitz (ed.). Advances in experimental social psychology. Orlando: Academic Press, 1989. Vol. 22. P. 287–343.
References
Bortolotti, L. (2018). Stranger than fiction: Costs and benefits of everyday confabulation. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 9 (2), 227–249. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-017-0367-y
Brown, C., Lloyd-Jones, T. J. (2005). Verbal facilitation of face recognition. Memory & Cognition, 33, 1442–1456. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03193377
Chater, N., Johansson, P., Hall, L. (2011). The nonexistence of risk attitude. Frontiers in Psychology, 2, 303. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00303
Chrobak, Q. M., Zaragoza, M. S. (2008). Inventing stories: Forcing witnesses to fabricate entire fictitious events leads to freely reported false memories. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 15 (6), 1190–1195. https://doi.org/10.3758/PBR.15.6.1190
Cochran, K. J., Greenspan, R. L., Bogart, D. F., Loftus, E. F. (2016). Memory blindness: Altered memory reports lead to distortion in eyewitness memory. Memory and Cognition, 44, 717–726. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-016-0594-y
Ecker, U. K. H., Lewandowsky, S., Cheung, C. S. C., Maybery, M. T. (2015). He did it! She did it! No, she did not! Multiple causal explanations and the continued influence of misinformation. Journal of Memory and Language, 85, 101–115. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2015.09.002
Festinger, L. (1999). A theory of cognitive dissonance. St. Petersburg, Iuventa Publ. (In Russian)
Gershkovich, V. A. (2006). False memories as a result of cognitive dissonance reduction. In: Kognitivnye issledovaniia: sbornik nauchnykh trudov (pp. 163–176). Moscow, Institute of Psychology. (In Russian)
Gershkovich, V. A. (2015). The influence of disinformation on memory of a made choice. Vestnik Rossiyskogo gumanitarnogo nauchnogo fonda, 2 (79), 208–217. (In Russian)
Gershkovich, V. A., Gaponenko, A. V. (2015). Talking about what we don’t know: manifestation of choice blindness when filling out the 16-factor questionnaire by R. Cattell. Vestnik Iaroslavskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta im. P. G. Demidova. Ser. Gumanitarnye nauki, 1 (31), 76–84. (In Russian)
Gershkovich, V. A., Tikhonov, R. V., Vasilieva, A. S., Lvova, O. V. (2022). How others change our memories: the effect of exposure to anonymous opinions. The Russian Journal of Cognitive Science, 9 (1–2), 44–52. https://doi.org/10.47010/22.1-2.3
Hall L., Johansson P., Strandberg T. (2012). Lifting the veil of morality: Choice blindness and attitude reversals on a self-transforming survey. PLoS ONE, 7 (9), e45457. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0045457
Hall L., Strandberg T., Pärnamets P., Lind A., Tärning B., Johansson P. (2013). How the polls can be both spot on and dead wrong: using choice blindness to shift political attitudes and voter intentions. PLoS ONE, 8 (4), e60554. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0060554
Johansson P., Hall L., Sikström S., Olsson A. (2005). Failure to detect mismatches between intention and outcome in a simple decision task. Science, 310 (5745), 116–119. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1111709
Johansson, P., Hall, L., Sikström, S., Tärning, B., Lind, A. (2006). How something can be said about telling more than we can know: On choice blindness and introspection. Consciousness and Cognition, 15 (4), 673–699. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2006.09.004
Johansson, P., Hall, L., Sikström S. (2008). From change blindness to choice blindness. Psychologia, 51 (2), 142–155. https://doi.org/10.2117/PSYSOC. 2008.142
Johansson, P., Hall, L., Tärning, B., Sikström, S., Chater, N. (2013). Choice blindness and preference change: You will like this paper better if you (believe you) chose to read it! Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 27, 281–289. https://doi.org/10.1002/bdm.1807
Lee, A. J., Hibbs, C., Wright, M. J., Martin, N. G., Keller, M. C., Zietsch, B. P. (2017). Assessing the accuracy of perceptions of intelligence based on heritable facial features. Intelligence, 64, 1–8.
Loftus, E. F., Hoffman, H. G. (1989). Misinformation and memory: The creation of new memories. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 118 (1), 100–104. https://doi.org/10.1037/0096-3445.118.1.100
Meissner, C. A., Brigham, J. C., Kelley, C. M. (2001). The influence of retrieval processes in verbal overshadowing. Memory & Cognition, 2001, 29, 176–186. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03195751
Moroshkina, N. V. (2023). Verbal overshadowing. In: Bol’shaia rossiiskaia entsiklopediia: nauchno-obrazovatel’nyi portal. Available at: https://bigenc.ru/c/verbal-noe-zatenenie-db6bf9/?v=6173460 (accessed: 28.04.2023). (In Russian)
Moroshkina, N. V., Ivanchei, I. I., Tikhonov, R. V., Karpov, A. D., Ovchinnikova, I. V. (2018). Development and validation of the “Russian database of neutral and smiling female faces” (“RuNeS Faces”). Eksperimental’naia psikhologiia, 11 (2), 34–49. https://doi.org/10.17759/exppsy.201811020 (In Russian)
Nisbett, R. E., Wilson, T. D. (1977). Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes. Psychological Review, 84 (3), 231–259. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X. 84.3.231
Otgaar, H., Baker, A. (2018). When lying changes memory for the truth. Memory, 26 (1), 2–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/09658211.2017.1340286
Pärnamets, P., Hall, L., Johansson, P. (2015). Memory distortions resulting from a choice blindness task. In: D. C. Noelle, R. Dale, A. S. Warlaumont, J. Yoshimi, T. Matlock, C. D. Jennings, P. P. Maglio (eds). Proceedings of the 37th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1823–1828). Austin, Cognitive Science Society.
Peirce, J. W., Gray, J. R., Simpson, S., MacAskill, M. R., Höchenberger, R., Sogo, H., Kastman, E., Lindeløv, J. (2019). PsychoPy: Experiments in behavior made easy. Behavior Research Methods, 51 (1), 195–203. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-018-01193-y
Polage, D. (2017). The effect of telling lies on belief in the truth. Europe’s journal of psychology, 13 (4), 633–644. https://doi.org/10.5964/ejop.v13i4.1422
Razorilova, P. V. (2017). The influence of disinformation on memory of a decision: Master’s thesis (Psychology). St. Petersburg. (In Russian)
Rodriguez, D. N., Strange, D. (2005). False memories for dissonance inducing events. Memory, 23 (2), 203–212. https://doi.org/1080/09658211.2014.881501
Sagana, A., Sauerland, M., Merckelbach, H. (2013). Witnesses’ blindness for their own facial recognition decisions: A field study. Behavioral Sciences & the Law, 31 (5), 624–636. https://doi.org/10.1002/bsl.2082
Sagana, A., Sauerland, M., Merckelbach, H. (2014). “This is the person you selected”: Eyewitnesses’ blindness for their own facial recognition decisions. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 28 (5), 753–764. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.3062
Sagana, A., Sauerland, M., Merckelbach, H. (2014). Memory impairment is not sufficient for choice blindness to occur. Frontiers in Psychology, 20 (5), 449. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00449
Schooler, J. W., Gerhard, D., Loftus, E. F. (1986). Qualities of the unreal. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 12 (2), 171–181. https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.12.2.171
Schooler, J. W., Engstler-Schooler, T. Y. (1990). Verbal overshadowing of visual memories: Some things are better left unsaid. Cognitive Psychology, 22 (1), 36–71. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0285(90)90003-m
Stille, L., Norin, E., Sikström, S. (2017). Self-delivered misinformation — Merging the choice blindness and misinformation effect paradigms. PLoS ONE, 12 (3), e0173606. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0173606
Strandberg, T., Sivén, D., Hall, L., Johansson, P., Pärnamets, P. (2018). False beliefs and confabulation can lead to lasting changes in political attitudes. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 147 (9), 1382 – 1399. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000489
White, P. A. (1987). Causal report accuracy: retrospect and prospect. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 23 (4), 311–315. https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-1031(87)90043-6
Wilson, T. D., Dunn, D. S., Kraft, D., Lisle, D. J. (1989). Introspection, attitude change, and attitude-behavior consistency: The disruptive effects of explaining why we feel the way we do. In: L. Berkowitz (ed.). Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (vol. 22, pp. 287–343). Orlando, Academic Press.
Downloads
Published
2023-12-08
How to Cite
Gershkovich, V., Tikhonov, R., Bystrova , E., & Lvova, O. (2023). The influence of confabulations about the reasons for the choice on the formation of false memories. Vestnik of Saint Petersburg University. Psychology, 13(4), 566–585. https://doi.org/10.21638/spbu16.2023.409
Issue
Section
Empirical and Experimental Research
License
Articles of "Vestnik of Saint Petersburg University. Psychology" are open access distributed under the terms of the License Agreement with Saint Petersburg State University, which permits to the authors unrestricted distribution and self-archiving free of charge.
