Citation

Hanba JM, Zaragoza MS. Appl. Cogn. Psychol. 2007; 21(4): 433-455.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2007, John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1002/acp.1286

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The effects of confirmatory interviewer feedback on eyewitness testimony following forcibly confabulated and accurate responses to repeated interview questions were investigated in two experiments. The first experiment showed that, relative to neutral feedback, confirmatory feedback provided after a forcibly confabulated response greatly increased the likelihood that participants would provide the same confabulated response when re-interviewed 2 days later, led participants to report these repeated confabulations with greater speed and fewer expressions of doubt, and increased the prevalence of false memories. Confirmatory interviewer feedback provided following accurate responses appeared to have more modest consequences for consistency and confidence, but ceiling effects provided little opportunity for observing potential effects. A second experiment showed that these effects of confirmatory feedback are of considerable practical significance, in that, regardless of their accuracy, responses that had earlier been reinforced with confirmatory feedback were much more likely to be judged by others as credible. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Language: en