RESEARCH REPORT

Deryn Strange Æ Matthew P. Gerrie Æ Maryanne Garry

A few seemingly harmless routes to a false memory

Received: 17 June 2005 / Revised: 7 July 2005Accepted: 11 July 2005 / Published online: 17 August 2005� Marta Olivetti Belardinelli and Springer-Verlag 2005

Abstract Since the invention of photography we havelearned to rely on photos to help us remember significantmoments in our lives. We have come to believe thatphotographs are accurate and valuable records of eventsthat—years down the track—we may not be able toremember. In this paper, we review recent researchdemonstrating that photographs can also help us to‘‘remember’’ events that never really happened. We tracethe development of the leading false autobiographicalmemory paradigm, and we then describe research on thepower of both fake narrative stories and fake photo-graphs to cultivate false memories.

Keywords Memories Æ False memories Æ Photographs

It is a truism that for the upside of every technologicaladvance there is also a downside. For example, as sci-entists map out the human genome, we stand on theedge of countless medical breakthroughs—yet at thesame time, we have new concerns about the ethics ofgenetic screening, genetic privacy and even gene own-ership. The dual nature of technological advances alsoholds true for modern digital image manipulation. Welive in a world where increasingly sophisticated tech-nology is available to anyone with a computer. Not solong ago, only Hollywood movie studios and advertisingagencies had the skill and the equipment to doctorphotographs. These days, all you need is a digital cam-era, image editing software, and the capacity to followinstructions. Across the world, families are erasing es-tranged sons-in-law from family photos, adding in theimage of a daughter who did not make it home for theholidays, or assembling new photos of their children

meeting their cartoon idols. How could there possibly bea downside to such harmless fun? Are there conse-quences to representing an event differently from how ithappened? In fact, the answer is yes: recent evidencesuggests that photographs can influence our memories.In this paper, we review research showing that photo-graphs, both true and false, can lead to entirely falseautobiographical memories.

A decade ago, (Loftus 1993; Loftus and Pickrell1995) showed just how easy it is to lead people toremember a wholly false childhood event. Loftus andPickrell developed what has become known as the falsenarrative paradigm. First, they asked subjects to read aseries of stories, or ‘‘narratives,’’ written by the subject’sfamily members. These stories described some of thesubject’s own childhood experiences. Next, Loftus andPickrell asked subjects to describe their memory of eachof the events, in as much detail as they could remember,over two interviews. Unknown to the subjects, one of thestories was false, concocted by the experimenters andverified as false by family members. This false narrativedescribed the subject getting lost in a shopping mall andeventually being returned, by a kind elderly person, tothe relieved family. Loftus and Pickrell found that by theend of the study, 25% of the subjects had falselyremembered at least some details about their being lostin the mall.

Today, it is easy to underestimate the significance ofthese ‘‘lost in the mall’’ studies, perhaps because in alittle over 10 years, we have come so far in under-standing how false memories develop. Yet when Loftus(1993) and Loftus and Pickrell (1995) published theirwork, there was little scientific evidence that wholly falseevents could be ‘‘implanted’’ into memory. Moreover, atthe height of the ‘‘recovered memory therapy’’ wave,nonscientists were quick to claim that laboratory re-search had no bearing on traumatic memory, and somescientists hypothesized that people could not be misledabout significant personal experiences (see Garry andPolaschek 2000, for a review). Thus, the false narrativeparadigm led to a rapid shift in thinking about memory,

Communicated by John Sutton

D. Strange Æ M. P. Gerrie Æ M. Garry (&)School of Psychology Victoria, University of Wellington,PO Box 600, Wellington, New ZealandE-mail: maryanne.garry@vuw.ac.nzTel.: +64-4-4635769Fax: +64-4-4635402

Cogn Process (2005) 6: 237–242DOI 10.1007/s10339-005-0009-7

and became an important new tool for scientists. Indeed,since Loftus and Pickrell’s (1995) work appeared, thefalse narrative paradigm has proven both popular andpowerful. Nine false narrative studies (Garry and Wade2005; Hyman and Billings 1998; Hyman et al. 1995;Hyman and Pentland 1996; Lindsay et al. 2004; Loftusand Pickrell 1995; Pezdek et al. 1997; Ost et al. 2003;Porter et al. 1999) have produced false memories in 0–81% of their subjects (Pezdek 2005; Garry and Wade2005), with a weighted mean of 33% false recall. Acrossthese nine studies, subjects have come to rememberevents as wide-ranging as knocking over the punch bowlat a wedding, to being attacked by an animal (Hymanet al. 1995; Porter et al. 1999).

Of course, with such high levels of false recall, onemight raise a legitimate question: how do we know thatthe memories subjects recall are false? That is, are we notsimply putting more faith in the confederate’s memorythan in the subject’s memory? It is important to note thatsubjects try to recall a specific event, and confederatesconfirm that the specific event never occurred. And hereinlies the ironic nature of false memories: they are neverreally completely false. People develop false memoriesprecisely because they contain real people, places, anddetails. It is these idiosyncratic features that carry thefalse parts along, hiding in plain sight. Moreover, thewide range of events implanted in the literature suggeststhat at least some of the reported memories are false.

What do we know about how false narratives devel-op? Research suggests that there are four distinct pro-cesses involved in the development of a false memory(Hyman and Kleinknecht 1999; Hyman and Loftus1998; Mazzoni et al. 2001). Subjects must first find theevent plausible, then develop a belief that the eventhappened, then construct a memory of what the eventwould have been like, and finally, mistakenly attributetheir constructed memory to actual experience. Thismisattribution is known as a source monitoring error(Johnson et al. 1993). According to Johnson et al.source monitoring is the process by which we identifywhere we learned a particular piece of information, orwhether we truly won the lottery or only imagined it.The source monitoring framework (SMF, Johnson et al.1993) suggests that we make source monitoring errorsbecause our memories are not tagged with a labelspecifying the memory’s origins. Instead, we use a set ofcriteria to determine where a memory may have origi-nated, and sometimes those criteria fail us. Of course,these processes—plausibility, belief, memory construc-tion, and source monitoring—are interrelated. Forexample, a man who comes to believe that he really hadthe suggested experience will probably judge that expe-rience to be plausible. Likewise, developing a belief thatthe suggested experience really happened will undoubt-edly influence whether he goes on to construct a memoryof that event. In other words, the processes do notnecessarily occur in a linear fashion.

Unfortunately, while it is common sense to assumethat some personality types are more prone to false

memories than others, efforts to discover what thosetypes are have produced inconsistent results. Forexample, several studies have found that people whodissociate—who tend to confuse fantasy andreality—are more likely to develop false memories thanthose who do not (Hyman and Billings 1998; Merckel-bach et al. 2000; Ost et al. 1997, 2005; Porter et al.2000). By contrast however, other studies have found norelationship between dissociation and false memories(Eisen et al. 2002; Hekkenen and McEvoy 2002;Horselenberg et al. 2000; Platt et al. 1998; Wade 2004;Wilkinson and Hyman 1998). Similarly, high self-mon-itors—people who show a strong tendency to want toplease other people—have been shown to be more likelyto develop false memories in some studies (Ost et al.2002; Gudjonsson 2002) and less likely to develop falsememories in others (Ost et al. 2005). In addition, whilePorter et al. (2000) found that introverts were morelikely to develop false memories, Wade (2004) found nosuch relationship. Thus, if some personality types aremore prone to false memories we, as yet, do not knowwhat they are.

We do, however, know that many different factorscan influence the ‘‘memory construction’’ process.Simply put, any task that involves thinking about,imagining, or talking about a false event can encouragethe generation of false information, and as that gen-erated information becomes phenomenologically simi-lar to genuinely perceived information—memories fromreal experiences—the chance of making a sourcemonitoring error increases. In other words, the chanceof developing a false memory increases. The falsenarrative method may be so powerful in inducing falsememories because it encourages people to create amemory. It is not hard to see how a story supposedlywritten by a family member, that describes a childhoodevent, replete with idiosyncratic detail, induces eachsubject to think about, imagine, and talk about thatevent in an effort to remember it. But is there anothermeans of delivering the suggestion that would be evenmore engaging, and encourage even more thinking,imagining, and talking? Yes, thought Wade et al.(2002): the photograph.

False photographs and false memories

Photojournalist Diane Arbus once said that, ‘‘when itcomes to a photograph, the more it tells you, the less youknow.’’ We have all been baffled by our own childhoodphotographs. When we flick through childhood photoalbums, we are sometimes confronted with images ofpeople, places, and events that we do not recognize. Yetwe do not dispute the authenticity of the photographs,because even though we know a photograph can befaked, we assume our personal photos are real. Andoften, those photographs begin to stir vague, discon-nected fragments of events. It is this phenomenon that

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Wade et al. (2002) exploited. They wondered whetherour own common experiences with photographs couldbe used to cultivate a false memory.

Wade et al. (2002) used Loftus and Pickrell’s (1995)‘‘Lost in the mall’’ method, but replaced the narrativeswith photographs. They too asked subjects about fourchildhood events, one of which was false. UsingPhotoshop (a common computer software package),Wade et al. doctored the subject and other familymembers in to a photograph of a hot air balloon, anevent that family member confederates confirmed hadnever really happened. Regardless, after three interviewswhere subjects were asked to imagine what the balloonride would have been like, 50% came to develop at leastimages of the ride. Of course, simply providing a reportof an event does not necessarily mean that subjects havedeveloped a false memory. Researchers thus look forother indicators of memory, such as reporting additionaldetails of the event. For example:

I’m certain it occurred when I was [in 6th grade] at umthe local school... Um basically for $10 or somethingyou could go up in a hot air balloon and go up about20 odd meters... it would have been a Saturday and Ithink we went with, yeah, parents and, no it wasn’t,not my grandmother, not certain who any of the otherpeople are there. Um, and I’m pretty certain thatmum is down on the ground taking a photo.’’ (Wadeet al. 2002, p. 600).

Another indicator of a memory is subjects’ belief thatthe event really happened, such as at debriefing. At theend of the study, some subjects expressed genuineastonishment when they learned that the photographwas a fake. For example, one subject exclaimed, ‘‘Is thatright? Yeah, truly? How’d you do that?!’’ Suggesting thatthey truly believed that what they were reporting was areal memory.

Sutherland et al. (2005) were also interested in thepower of doctored photographs on memory. However,their specific interest was in whether doctored photo-graphs could be used to induce children to remembereven implausible false events. To this end, they showed6- and 10-year-old children, two true photographs andtwo doctored photographs of past events at threeinterviews. One of the false events was a higher plausi-bility event—the same balloon ride event that Wadeet al. (2002) used—and the other was a lower plausibilityevent, having a cup of tea with Prince Charles.

Sutherland et al. found that by the third interview,both 6- and 10-year old children were just as likely tohave developed a memory of the plausible balloon rideas the less plausible tea date with Prince Charles. Notsurprisingly, 6-year olds were more likely to developfalse memories than 10-year olds (40% vs 17%). Inaddition, just like Wade et al. (2002) observed, chil-dren’s memory reports were full of detail, from the costof the balloon ride to the family’s activities when the ridewas over. Sutherland et al. concluded that a doctored

photograph is an extremely powerful means of suggest-ing a false event, and can lead children to believe thatthey had had even implausible, entirely false, experi-ences.

In short, when subjects review doctored photographs,they can come to report having an experience that theynever really had had. Taken together, research showsthat both false narratives and false photographs can leadto false memories in both adults and children. Note,however, that the false photo studies do not tell us therelative power of photographs compared with falsenarratives. Which medium is the more powerful tool forinducing false memories? That was the question Garryand Wade (2005) asked.

False photographs versus false narratives

Both Wade et al. (2002) and Sutherland et al. (2005)speculated that the personalized photographs mightprovide subjects with some kind of cognitive ‘‘spring-board,’’ allowing them to generate thoughts, feelings,details, and images—the hallmarks of genuine memo-ries—about the false event more easily than is possiblewith verbal descriptions alone. Indeed, Strange (2005)showed that the personalized detail added in to the doc-tored photo made subjects more than twice as likely todevelop false memories. In that study, some children sawa doctored photograph of themselves and other familymembers taking a hot air balloon ride, while others saw aphotograph of the hot air balloon only and were told thatthey went for a ride in it. After three interviews 47% ofthe personalized detail subjects had developed a falsememory of the balloon ride, compared to 19%of the non-personalized photo subjects. Clearly, the personalizeddetail is an important aspect of the doctored photo.Strange’s (2005) results, however, do not tell us whetherthe personalized detail in a photograph is any more per-suasive then the personalized detail in a narrative.

Garry and Wade (2005) put the speculation aboutphotographs to the test, by examining whichmedium—photographs or narratives—was actually bet-ter at cultivating false memories. They combined themethods of Loftus and Pickrell (1995) and Wade et al.(2002) such that subjects were once again asked aboutfour events, but half of the subjects saw a doctoredphotograph depicting themselves and other familymembers taking a balloon ride, while the other half oftheir subjects read a narrative describing the ride. Garryand Wade ensured that subjects received the sameamount of information about each event by askingjudges to extract all the information they could from theballoon photograph, and then using that information tocreate the narrative.

By the end of the study, one medium proved to be theclear winner in its ability to cultivate false memories. Butto the surprise of Garry and Wade, it was the narratives:80% of the subjects who read a false narrative came to

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remember something about the event, compared with50% of the subjects who saw a false photograph.Interestingly, whether subjects thought photographs ornarratives were better at ‘‘jogging’’ their memories de-pended on whether they had seen a photograph of thehot air balloon ride, or read a narrative describing it.Narrative subjects thought that photographs provided abetter memory cue, while photograph subjects thoughtnarratives were the better cue. In other words, whateverinitial difficulty subjects had in recalling the false event,they blamed it on the medium with which it had beenpresented.

Taken together, these studies show that doctoredphotographs are a powerful means of delivering a falsesuggestion. However, they also suggest that doctoredphotographs might actually be less powerful than theirlow-tech counterparts, false narratives. If Wade et al.(2002) and Sutherland et al. (2005) were right andphotographs do act like a kind of cognitive ‘‘spring-board’’ helping subjects to not only develop a belief thata false event really happened, but also helping subjectsto imagine all the details of that false event, then Garryand Wade’s (2005) results seem rather counterintuitive.Why should narratives encourage more false memoriesthan photographs? The answer may lie in the nature ofthe photograph itself.

Although photographs are a source of rich detail, insome circumstances they might actually constrain imag-ination. They allow little, if any, room for the imagessubjects generate to differ from those depicted in thephotograph; by contrast, narratives allow subjects toimagine the specific details of an event in any way theychoose. Thus, while subjects who saw a photograph wereconfined to imaging that one balloon, subjects who saw anarrative could imagine their own balloon. As a result,subjects who saw the photograph may have found it amore difficult task, and would have been less likely togenerate details similar in quality to details in genuinememories. Such a process would have led to fewer falsememories compared to subjects who read the narrative. Inshort, Garry and Wade’s (2005) study suggests that peo-ple can develop false memories if the suggestion allowsthem the room to imagine their own details of the event.

True photographs and false memories

We know that doctored photographs can elicit falsememories, and their power relative to narratives suggestssomething about the processes that ultimately lead tofalse memories. Still, unless we somehow find ourselvessplashed across the cover of a supermarket tabloid, mostof us will never be confronted with images of ourselvesdoing things we have never done, or in places we havenever been. What is more likely is that we will be at afamily gathering, the sort where someone inevitablypulls out old photo albums so the group can reminisceabout their long ago experiences. Just as inevitably, onemember of the group is likely to claim to remember an

event of which someone else has only a vague recollec-tion. Is the rememberer’s version of events more pow-erful when there is a photo accompanying her story? Inother words, what is the impact of a false story when itis—or is not—buttressed with a true photograph?

Lindsay et al. (2004) addressed this very question.They asked subjects to remember three school events:two true events from grades 5–6 and 3–4, and a falseevent from grade 1–2. The false event they suggested wasthat their teacher had punished them for putting Slime(the gooey green child’s toy) into her desk drawer.Lindsay et al. (2004) gave all their subjects a narrativedescribing each of the three events. However, half of thesubjects also saw their actual class photograph from therelevant age to help cue their memories for each event.By the end of the study, 45% of those who read thenarrative describing the Slime incident had come toremember details about putting the goop in their tea-cher’s desk. By contrast, 78% of those who also sawtheir class photograph remembered details of the event.These results show that in some situations true photo-graphs can be just as dangerous as false photographs.

These results lead us to question the safety of psy-chotherapeutic techniques that rely on clients’ photo-graphs. In these clinical settings, there is rarely aphotograph depicting the clients’ presenting problem,but that is not the point of photo-based therapy. In-stead, photographs are used as cues, often in combina-tion with imagination, to help clients remember otherevents or emotions (Dolan 1991; Weiser 2001, 2002).For example, Weiser (2001) wrote:

During Photo Therapy sessions, photos are not justpassively reflected upon in silent contemplation, butalso actively created, posed for, talked with, listenedto, reconstructed, revised to form or illustrate newnarratives, collected on assignment, re-visualized inmemory or imagination, integrated into art therapyexpressions or even set into animated dialogue withother photos (p. 12).

In fact, psychotherapy’s fondness for photo-basedtherapy may not be limited to using true photographs.Weiser’s (2002) ‘‘Photo Therapy’’ approach advocatesusing photographs as projective tests, with the thera-pist’s job to ‘‘help people rediscover what they alreadyknow unconsciously’’ (p. 19). Weiser looks forward tothe ‘‘exciting possibilities...for using photos as counsel-ing tools with clients who have scanners...[and] photo-manipulation software’’ (p.24). Unfortunately, one ofthe possibilities Weiser might encounter is not so excit-ing at all: that clients develop unhelpful—or worse,harmful—false memories.

The role of discussion in developing false memories

One of the hallmarks of false memory studies, whetherbased on narratives or photographs, is that subjects are

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instructed not to talk to anybody about the eventsduring the study. Such an instruction makes perfectsense when the research question concerns whether ornot subjects can come to remember a false event on theirown. Yet obviously what most people would do, if theysaw a childhood photo depicting them in an event thatthey did not remember, is to talk to family members.

Indeed, we know that when confronted with ‘a diffi-cult to remember’ narrative about one’s childhood,people are likely to rely on others to verify their mem-ories. Wade and Garry (2005) asked subjects to imaginethemselves in Loftus and Pickrell’s (1995) study, and todescribe what they would do if they had ‘‘remembered’’being lost in the mall—more specifically, what theywould do to determine whether the memory was real.Subjects overwhelmingly reported relying on one of twostrategies. The most popular one, suggested by 49%,was a cognitive strategy, and included concentrating,imagining, weighing up accounts of the event, etc. Thesecond most popular strategy was suggested by 41% ofsubjects, who said they would talk to family members.Importantly, of the subjects who said they would consultfamily members first, 57% said they would use a cog-nitive technique as their secondary strategy. These re-sults suggest that when subjects are prohibited fromtalking to family members, they will default to trying toevaluate their memory by using strategies that areknown to cultivate false memories.

With Wade and Garry’s (2005) results in mind,French et al. (2005) wondered what would happen to thefalse memory rate when subjects were given the oppor-tunity to discuss a target event with a family member. Tomake it easier for siblings to take part in the study, theycollected data over a website discussion board. But asecondary research question arose from that decision:perhaps delivering a false suggestion over the Internetmight not be as persuasive as having an interviewerdeliver that same suggestion. For example, without theinterviewer in the room, subjects would be under pres-sure to recall events. Moreover, asking subjects to lookat their childhood photos on a computer might serve toheighten the technological sophistication of the study,and lead some subjects to suspect that one of the pho-tographs was a fake.

There were two phases to the French et al. (2005)study. In the first phase, pairs of siblings tried to recallfour childhood events, including the false balloon ride,and to do so independently of the other. Despite theconcerns about the comparatively weak persuasivepower of the Internet, at the end of this first ‘‘inde-pendent’’ phase, 24% of subjects had remembered de-tails of the balloon ride, a figure in line with thefindings from other studies. The twist in the Frenchet al. study happened in the next phase. Here, siblingstook turns logging on to a website discussion boardand posting what they could remember about eachevent. They repeated the process, so that each siblingposted three times. During the entire second phase,siblings could see (and respond to) what the other had

written. By the end of this ‘‘discussion’’ phase, the falsememory rate had dropped substantially: only 7% ofsubjects remembered details of the balloon ride. If asibling in the pair tended to believe the balloon ridewas real, the second sibling almost always tended tobelieve it never happened, and caused doubt on thepart of the tentative believer.

Taken together, French et al.’s (2005) study showsthat even with very little social pressure a substantialproportion of subjects will develop false memories.Discussing that false event however, is likely to makesubjects reevaluate that memory, ultimately makingthem more accurate.

Conclusions

Some cognitive scientists have noted that cognition doesnot necessarily exist solely inside our bodies. Forexample, Clark and Chalmers (1998) urged us to ponderthe slippery question of where our minds stop and therest of the world starts. If we use devices outside of ourbodies to remember information, then why should wenot consider them an extension of—or in fact partof—our memory? Photographs are an example of such adevice. Is the fact that we tend not to carry our photo-graphs around everywhere the reason we are reluctant tothink of them as part of our memory? Such reluctanceseems churlish—and perhaps even a moot point, par-ticularly when new and sophisticated gadgets such as theiPod let their owner tote around some ‘‘25,000 photos inyour pocket.’’

Nonetheless, devices such as photographs help us tooffload cognitive effort, both in storing and remember-ing our experiences. Yet the research we have discussedhere suggests that the very same effort-reducing factorsthat make some cognitive devices so appealing also givethem their ability to wreak havoc on memory.

Acknowledgements We are grateful to the Royal Society of NewZealand and the Marsden Fund for their generous support of thisresearch under contract VUW205 to MG. DS and MPG are sup-ported by scholarships from VUW.

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