Notable psychologist's theories and studies

The term 'false memories' refers to cases in which people remember events differently from the way in which they actually occurred, or in severe cases, remember events that never happened at all.

   False memories have been a query long in psychology, being studied as early as Sigmund Freud, being woven into his theories of memory repression of past events and trauma. These studies have only snowballed and gained more and more traction in recent decades with more attention being given to the subject.

Frederic Barlett:

 In the event of memory recall, the reconstruction of the memory can be fragmented with missing details which means that the false aspects of the memory are only filled in as the human brain recalls the information and adds fitting context around it. This context comes from theoretical 'schemas' which are essentially files of information from past learning and experiences which the brain can process and use to complete the memory (Barlett's schema theory).

Loftus and Palmer:

American psychologists Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer conducted two experiments, 1974, which used leading questions to conjure false memories based on the viewing of car crashes in film clips. Participants, after viewing the car crash clips, were asked two questions which introduced post-event information of the clips subtly. For example, the first question was 'How fast were the cars going when they smashed/collided/bumped/hit/contacted each other?'. Depending on which verb was used in the question depended on how the participant answered as the more violent verbs suggested a faster and more brutal collision. This conclusively proved what was dubbed the misinformation effect  and there was a 9 mph difference in the average speeds participants gave between the most and least violent verbs used (smashed vs. contacted). The pair wrote about the weight that eye-witness testimonies hold in criminal trials and the fragility of this 'evidence' introducing their paper 'Eyewitness Testimony' with "'I saw it with my own eyes, I can tell you exactly what happened. This statement carries a lot of weight when we are trying to find out about an event." (Loftus and Palmer)

Loftus, Miller, and Burns:

The continuing focus on leading questions pushed on to more studies in 1978 in which the wording of a question asking participants if they'd seen 'a stop light' or 'the stop light' influenced the answers given. They found that more people answered with yes when the definite article of 'the' was used as oppose to 'a' which suggested to them that the definite use of 'the' convinced people to trust this hint of existence of the object to the point of believing it was definitively there (Misinformation effect).

The continuation:

This research influenced others to continue studying the fragility of our memory and how much we can trust it which lead to an aim of successfully creating a whole new memory and implanting it for somebody to falsely 'remember'. James Coan, Roediger and McDermott, and other psychologists achieved this which have whole posts dedicated to them in more detail.