Project
When Lies Become the Truth: The Impact of Lying on Memory in the Courtroom
Victims, witnesses, and offenders often lie in the legal field to, for example, avoid conflict or responsibility. A understudied question is whether we might come to believe our lies or not. Hence, this research proposal will study what the effects of lying will have on memory when people eventually come forward with the truth. In experimental settings we will examine the impact of deceptive strategies such as false denials, feign amnesia, and fabrication in well-known memory paradigms such as the Deese-Roediger-McDermott, Misinformation (DRM), Amsterdam Short Term Memory (ASTM), and Forced-Confabulation paradigms. General aims are to explore whether different deceptive strategies will impair our memory through forgetting details, false memories, or both. This project holds practical and theoretical importance. Theoretically, it will expand the Memory and Deception (MAD; Otgaar & Baker, 2018) framework in understanding the relationship between the necessary cognitive load of a lie and its specific impact on memory. Practically, it will give insights into the reliability of the memory of victims, witnesses, and offenders after they lied about an event, which is of vital importance for a legal system.